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Wei Fan

Publications and source records attributed to Wei Fan.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

Multi-step Jailbreaking Privacy Attacks on ChatGPT

With the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs), many downstream NLP tasks can be well solved given appropriate prompts. Though model developers and researchers work hard on dialog safety to avoid generating harmful content from LLMs, it is still challenging to steer AI-generated content (AIGC) for the human good. As powerful LLMs are devouring existing text data from various domains (e.g., GPT-3 is trained on 45TB texts), it is natural to doubt whether the private information is included in the training data and what privacy threats can these LLMs and their downstream applications bring. In this paper, we study the privacy threats from OpenAI's ChatGPT and the New Bing enhanced by ChatGPT and show that application-integrated LLMs may cause new privacy threats. To this end, we conduct extensive experiments to support our claims and discuss LLMs' privacy implications.

cs.CL↗

Dual-stage Flows-based Generative Modeling for Traceable Urban Planning

Urban planning, which aims to design feasible land-use configurations for target areas, has become increasingly essential due to the high-speed urbanization process in the modern era. However, the traditional urban planning conducted by human designers can be a complex and onerous task. Thanks to the advancement of deep learning algorithms, researchers have started to develop automated planning techniques. While these models have exhibited promising results, they still grapple with a couple of unresolved limitations: 1) Ignoring the relationship between urban functional zones and configurations and failing to capture the relationship among different functional zones. 2) Less interpretable and stable generation process. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel generative framework based on normalizing flows, namely Dual-stage Urban Flows (DSUF) framework. Specifically, the first stage is to utilize zone-level urban planning flows to generate urban functional zones based on given surrounding contexts and human guidance. Then we employ an Information Fusion Module to capture the relationship among functional zones and fuse the information of different aspects. The second stage is to use configuration-level urban planning flows to obtain land-use configurations derived from fused information. We design several experiments to indicate that our framework can outperform compared to other generative models for the urban planning task.

cs.LG↗

Crack-Net: Prediction of Crack Propagation in Composites

Computational solid mechanics has become an indispensable approach in engineering, and numerical investigation of fracture in composites is essential as composites are widely used in structural applications. Crack evolution in composites is the bridge to elucidate the relationship between the microstructure and fracture performance, but crack-based finite element methods are computationally expensive and time-consuming, limiting their application in computation-intensive scenarios. Here we propose a deep learning framework called Crack-Net, which incorporates the relationship between crack evolution and stress response to predict the fracture process in composites. Trained on a high-precision fracture development dataset generated using the phase field method, Crack-Net demonstrates a remarkable capability to accurately forecast the long-term evolution of crack growth patterns and the stress-strain curve for a given composite design. The Crack-Net captures the essential principle of crack growth, which enables it to handle more complex microstructures such as binary co-continuous structures. Moreover, transfer learning is adopted to further improve the generalization ability of Crack-Net for composite materials with reinforcements of different strengths. The proposed Crack-Net holds great promise for practical applications in engineering and materials science, in which accurate and efficient fracture prediction is crucial for optimizing material performance and microstructural design.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function on the celestial circle

In this short letter, we reformulate the Riemann zeta function using the holographic framework of the celestial conformal field theory. For spacetime dimension larger than our Minkowski spacetime $M^4$, the Riemann zeta function is connected with the sum of the conformal primary wavefunctions evaluated over a chain of points on the holographic boundary. Using analytic continuation, it follows that the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function is connected with the scaling dimension of conformal operators on the celestial circle. We discuss possible considerations with the spectrum of the celestial conformal field theory, number theory and topology.

hep-th↗

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Artificial Upwelling Energy Management

The potential of artificial upwelling (AU) as a means of lifting nutrient-rich bottom water to the surface, stimulating seaweed growth, and consequently enhancing ocean carbon sequestration, has been gaining increasing attention in recent years. This has led to the development of the first solar-powered and air-lifted AU system (AUS) in China. However, efficient scheduling of air injection systems in complex marine environments remains a crucial challenge in operating AUS, as it holds the potential to significantly improve energy efficiency. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel energy management approach that utilizes deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm to develop efficient strategies for operating AUS. Specifically, we formulate the problem of maximizing the energy efficiency of AUS as a Markov decision process and integrate the quantile network in distributional reinforcement learning (QR-DQN) with the deep dueling network to solve it. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance of our algorithm and demonstrate its superior effectiveness over traditional rule-based approaches and other DRL algorithms in reducing energy wastage while ensuring the stable and efficient operation of AUS. Our findings suggest that a DRL-based approach offers a promising way to improve the energy efficiency of AUS and enhance the sustainability of seaweed cultivation and carbon sequestration in the ocean.

cs.LG↗

Non-perturbative instanton effects in the quartic and the sextic double-well potential by the numerical bootstrap approach

Recently the non-perturbative numerical bootstrap method is rapidly developing, especially its application in nonlinear quantum mechanics, many-body physics, lattice models and matrix models. Here we use this numerical bootstrap to study the non-perturbative instanton effects in symmetric double-well potentials, using an efficient implementation of the algorithm proposed recently by Aikawa, Morita and Yoshimura. The ground state level splitting, caused by instantons, is computed for the quartic and the sextic case, where the coupling constant $g$ characterizes the strength of instanton effects. Inspired by well-known perturbative results that is only valid at large $g$ value under the dilute-gas limit, a qualitative formula is proposed for the ground state level splitting across all values of $g$, which agrees well with the bootstrap data. It has the expected behavior at both large value $|g|\to \infty$ and small value $|g|\to 0$, so it describes both the 'weak' and the 'strong' regimes of instanton effects. This qualitative formula is non-perturbative and can not be obtained by loop summation alone. It is beyond the dilute-gas approximation, and might be from a renormalization-group-like procedure or other undiscovered analytic methods.

hep-th↗

Graph Soft-Contrastive Learning via Neighborhood Ranking

Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has emerged as a promising approach in the realm of graph self-supervised learning. Prevailing GCL methods mainly derive from the principles of contrastive learning in the field of computer vision: modeling invariance by specifying absolutely similar pairs. However, when applied to graph data, this paradigm encounters two significant limitations: (1) the validity of the generated views cannot be guaranteed: graph perturbation may produce invalid views against semantics and intrinsic topology of graph data; (2) specifying absolutely similar pairs in the graph views is unreliable: for abstract and non-Euclidean graph data, it is difficult for humans to decide the absolute similarity and dissimilarity intuitively. Despite the notable performance of current GCL methods, these challenges necessitate a reevaluation: Could GCL be more effectively tailored to the intrinsic properties of graphs, rather than merely adopting principles from computer vision? In response to this query, we propose a novel paradigm, Graph Soft-Contrastive Learning (GSCL). This approach facilitates GCL via neighborhood ranking, avoiding the need to specify absolutely similar pairs. GSCL leverages the underlying graph characteristic of diminishing label consistency, asserting that nodes that are closer in the graph are overall more similar than far-distant nodes. Within the GSCL framework, we introduce pairwise and listwise gated ranking InfoNCE loss functions to effectively preserve the relative similarity ranking within neighborhoods. Moreover, as the neighborhood size exponentially expands with more hops considered, we propose neighborhood sampling strategies to improve learning efficiency. Our extensive empirical results across 11 commonly used graph datasets-including 8 homophily graphs and 3 heterophily graphs-demonstrate GSCL's superior performance compared to 20 SOTA GCL methods.

cs.LG↗

Background-Mixed Augmentation for Weakly Supervised Change Detection

Change detection (CD) is to decouple object changes (i.e., object missing or appearing) from background changes (i.e., environment variations) like light and season variations in two images captured in the same scene over a long time span, presenting critical applications in disaster management, urban development, etc. In particular, the endless patterns of background changes require detectors to have a high generalization against unseen environment variations, making this task significantly challenging. Recent deep learning-based methods develop novel network architectures or optimization strategies with paired-training examples, which do not handle the generalization issue explicitly and require huge manual pixel-level annotation efforts. In this work, for the first attempt in the CD community, we study the generalization issue of CD from the perspective of data augmentation and develop a novel weakly supervised training algorithm that only needs image-level labels. Different from general augmentation techniques for classification, we propose the background-mixed augmentation that is specifically designed for change detection by augmenting examples under the guidance of a set of background-changing images and letting deep CD models see diverse environment variations. Moreover, we propose the augmented & real data consistency loss that encourages the generalization increase significantly. Our method as a general framework can enhance a wide range of existing deep learning-based detectors. We conduct extensive experiments in two public datasets and enhance four state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the advantages of our method. We release the code at https://github.com/tsingqguo/bgmix.

cs.CV↗

Prophet Attention: Predicting Attention with Future Attention for Image Captioning

Recently, attention based models have been used extensively in many sequence-to-sequence learning systems. Especially for image captioning, the attention based models are expected to ground correct image regions with proper generated words. However, for each time step in the decoding process, the attention based models usually use the hidden state of the current input to attend to the image regions. Under this setting, these attention models have a "deviated focus" problem that they calculate the attention weights based on previous words instead of the one to be generated, impairing the performance of both grounding and captioning. In this paper, we propose the Prophet Attention, similar to the form of self-supervision. In the training stage, this module utilizes the future information to calculate the "ideal" attention weights towards image regions. These calculated "ideal" weights are further used to regularize the "deviated" attention. In this manner, image regions are grounded with the correct words. The proposed Prophet Attention can be easily incorporated into existing image captioning models to improve their performance of both grounding and captioning. The experiments on the Flickr30k Entities and the MSCOCO datasets show that the proposed Prophet Attention consistently outperforms baselines in both automatic metrics and human evaluations. It is worth noticing that we set new state-of-the-arts on the two benchmark datasets and achieve the 1st place on the leaderboard of the online MSCOCO benchmark in terms of the default ranking score, i.e., CIDEr-c40.

cs.CV↗

Dish-TS: A General Paradigm for Alleviating Distribution Shift in Time Series Forecasting

The distribution shift in Time Series Forecasting (TSF), indicating series distribution changes over time, largely hinders the performance of TSF models. Existing works towards distribution shift in time series are mostly limited in the quantification of distribution and, more importantly, overlook the potential shift between lookback and horizon windows. To address above challenges, we systematically summarize the distribution shift in TSF into two categories. Regarding lookback windows as input-space and horizon windows as output-space, there exist (i) intra-space shift, that the distribution within the input-space keeps shifted over time, and (ii) inter-space shift, that the distribution is shifted between input-space and output-space. Then we introduce, Dish-TS, a general neural paradigm for alleviating distribution shift in TSF. Specifically, for better distribution estimation, we propose the coefficient net (CONET), which can be any neural architectures, to map input sequences into learnable distribution coefficients. To relieve intra-space and inter-space shift, we organize Dish-TS as a Dual-CONET framework to separately learn the distribution of input- and output-space, which naturally captures the distribution difference of two spaces. In addition, we introduce a more effective training strategy for intractable CONET learning. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on several datasets coupled with different state-of-the-art forecasting models. Experimental results show Dish-TS consistently boosts them with a more than 20% average improvement. Code is available.

cs.LG↗

Approximate message passing from random initialization with applications to $\mathbb{Z}_{2}$ synchronization

This paper is concerned with the problem of reconstructing an unknown rank-one matrix with prior structural information from noisy observations. While computing the Bayes-optimal estimator seems intractable in general due to its nonconvex nature, Approximate Message Passing (AMP) emerges as an efficient first-order method to approximate the Bayes-optimal estimator. However, the theoretical underpinnings of AMP remain largely unavailable when it starts from random initialization, a scheme of critical practical utility. Focusing on a prototypical model called $\mathbb{Z}_{2}$ synchronization, we characterize the finite-sample dynamics of AMP from random initialization, uncovering its rapid global convergence. Our theory provides the first non-asymptotic characterization of AMP in this model without requiring either an informative initialization (e.g., spectral initialization) or sample splitting.

math.ST↗

Boosting Urban Traffic Speed Prediction via Integrating Implicit Spatial Correlations

Urban traffic speed prediction aims to estimate the future traffic speed for improving the urban transportation services. Enormous efforts have been made on exploiting spatial correlations and temporal dependencies of traffic speed evolving patterns by leveraging explicit spatial relations (geographical proximity) through pre-defined geographical structures ({\it e.g.}, region grids or road networks). While achieving promising results, current traffic speed prediction methods still suffer from ignoring implicit spatial correlations (interactions), which cannot be captured by grid/graph convolutions. To tackle the challenge, we propose a generic model for enabling the current traffic speed prediction methods to preserve implicit spatial correlations. Specifically, we first develop a Dual-Transformer architecture, including a Spatial Transformer and a Temporal Transformer. The Spatial Transformer automatically learns the implicit spatial correlations across the road segments beyond the boundary of geographical structures, while the Temporal Transformer aims to capture the dynamic changing patterns of the implicit spatial correlations. Then, to further integrate both explicit and implicit spatial correlations, we propose a distillation-style learning framework, in which the existing traffic speed prediction methods are considered as the teacher model, and the proposed Dual-Transformer architectures are considered as the student model. The extensive experiments over three real-world datasets indicate significant improvements of our proposed framework over the existing methods.

cs.LG↗

HGAN: Hierarchical Graph Alignment Network for Image-Text Retrieval

Image-text retrieval (ITR) is a challenging task in the field of multimodal information processing due to the semantic gap between different modalities. In recent years, researchers have made great progress in exploring the accurate alignment between image and text. However, existing works mainly focus on the fine-grained alignment between image regions and sentence fragments, which ignores the guiding significance of context background information. Actually, integrating the local fine-grained information and global context background information can provide more semantic clues for retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel Hierarchical Graph Alignment Network (HGAN) for image-text retrieval. First, to capture the comprehensive multimodal features, we construct the feature graphs for the image and text modality respectively. Then, a multi-granularity shared space is established with a designed Multi-granularity Feature Aggregation and Rearrangement (MFAR) module, which enhances the semantic corresponding relations between the local and global information, and obtains more accurate feature representations for the image and text modalities. Finally, the ultimate image and text features are further refined through three-level similarity functions to achieve the hierarchical alignment. To justify the proposed model, we perform extensive experiments on MS-COCO and Flickr30K datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed HGAN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both datasets, which demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of our model.

cs.CV↗

Dynamic probabilistic predictable feature analysis for multivariate temporal process monitoring

Dynamic statistical process monitoring methods have been widely studied and applied in modern industrial processes. These methods aim to extract the most predictable temporal information and develop the corresponding dynamic monitoring schemes. However, measurement noise is widespread in real-world industrial processes, and ignoring its effect will lead to sub-optimal modeling and monitoring performance. In this article, a probabilistic predictable feature analysis (PPFA) is proposed for multivariate time series modeling, and a multi-step dynamic predictive monitoring scheme is developed. The model parameters are estimated with an efficient expectation-maximum algorithm, where the genetic algorithm and Kalman filter are designed and incorporated. Further, a novel dynamic statistical monitoring index, Dynamic Index, is proposed as an important supplement of $\text{T}^2$ and $\text{SPE}$ to detect dynamic anomalies. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated via its application on the three-phase flow facility and a medium speed coal mill.

stat.ME↗

DiMBERT: Learning Vision-Language Grounded Representations with Disentangled Multimodal-Attention

Vision-and-language (V-L) tasks require the system to understand both vision content and natural language, thus learning fine-grained joint representations of vision and language (a.k.a. V-L representations) is of paramount importance. Recently, various pre-trained V-L models are proposed to learn V-L representations and achieve improved results in many tasks. However, the mainstream models process both vision and language inputs with the same set of attention matrices. As a result, the generated V-L representations are entangled in one common latent space. To tackle this problem, we propose DiMBERT (short for Disentangled Multimodal-Attention BERT), which is a novel framework that applies separated attention spaces for vision and language, and the representations of multi-modalities can thus be disentangled explicitly. To enhance the correlation between vision and language in disentangled spaces, we introduce the visual concepts to DiMBERT which represent visual information in textual format. In this manner, visual concepts help to bridge the gap between the two modalities. We pre-train DiMBERT on a large amount of image-sentence pairs on two tasks: bidirectional language modeling and sequence-to-sequence language modeling. After pre-train, DiMBERT is further fine-tuned for the downstream tasks. Experiments show that DiMBERT sets new state-of-the-art performance on three tasks (over four datasets), including both generation tasks (image captioning and visual storytelling) and classification tasks (referring expressions). The proposed DiM (short for Disentangled Multimodal-Attention) module can be easily incorporated into existing pre-trained V-L models to boost their performance, up to a 5% increase on the representative task. Finally, we conduct a systematic analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of our DiM and the introduced visual concepts.

cs.CV↗

TranSHER: Translating Knowledge Graph Embedding with Hyper-Ellipsoidal Restriction

Knowledge graph embedding methods are important for the knowledge graph completion (or link prediction) task. One existing efficient method, PairRE, leverages two separate vectors to model complex relations (i.e., 1-to-N, N-to-1, and N-to-N) in knowledge graphs. However, such a method strictly restricts entities on the hyper-ellipsoid surfaces which limits the optimization of entity distribution, leading to suboptimal performance of knowledge graph completion. To address this issue, we propose a novel score function TranSHER, which leverages relation-specific translations between head and tail entities to relax the constraint of hyper-ellipsoid restrictions. By introducing an intuitive and simple relation-specific translation, TranSHER can provide more direct guidance on optimization and capture more semantic characteristics of entities with complex relations. Experimental results show that TranSHER achieves significant performance improvements on link prediction and generalizes well to datasets in different domains and scales. Our codes are public available at https://github.com/yizhilll/TranSHER.

cs.AI↗

A Knowledge Distillation-Based Backdoor Attack in Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a novel framework of decentralized machine learning. Due to the decentralized feature of FL, it is vulnerable to adversarial attacks in the training procedure, e.g. , backdoor attacks. A backdoor attack aims to inject a backdoor into the machine learning model such that the model will make arbitrarily incorrect behavior on the test sample with some specific backdoor trigger. Even though a range of backdoor attack methods of FL has been introduced, there are also methods defending against them. Many of the defending methods utilize the abnormal characteristics of the models with backdoor or the difference between the models with backdoor and the regular models. To bypass these defenses, we need to reduce the difference and the abnormal characteristics. We find a source of such abnormality is that backdoor attack would directly flip the label of data when poisoning the data. However, current studies of the backdoor attack in FL are not mainly focus on reducing the difference between the models with backdoor and the regular models. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Knowledge Distillation(ADVKD), a method combine knowledge distillation with backdoor attack in FL. With knowledge distillation, we can reduce the abnormal characteristics in model result from the label flipping, thus the model can bypass the defenses. Compared to current methods, we show that ADVKD can not only reach a higher attack success rate, but also successfully bypass the defenses when other methods fails. To further explore the performance of ADVKD, we test how the parameters affect the performance of ADVKD under different scenarios. According to the experiment result, we summarize how to adjust the parameter for better performance under different scenarios. We also use several methods to visualize the effect of different attack and explain the effectiveness of ADVKD.

cs.LG↗

On the Feasibility of Out-of-Band Spatial Channel Information for Millimeter-Wave Beam Search

The rollout of millimeter-wave (mmWave) cellular network enables us to realize the full potential of 5G/6G with vastly improved throughput and ultra-low latency. MmWave communication relies on highly directional transmission, which significantly increase the training overhead for fine beam alignment. The concept of using out-of-band spatial information to aid mmWave beam search is developed when multi-band systems operating in parallel. The feasibility of leveraging low-band channel information for coarse estimation of high-band beam directions strongly depends on the spatial congruence between two frequency bands. In this paper, we try to provide insights into the answers of two important questions. First, how similar is the power angular spectra (PAS) of radio channels between two well-separated frequency bands? Then, what is the impact of practical system configurations on spatial channel similarity? Specifically, the beam direction-based metric is proposed to measure the power loss and number of false directions if out-of-band spatial information is used instead of in-band information. This metric is more practical and useful than comparing normalized PAS directly. Point cloud ray-tracing and measurement results across multiple frequency bands and environments show that the degree of spatial similarity of beamformed channels is related to antenna beamwidth, frequency gap, and radio link conditions.

cs.IT↗