Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Cmd: Co-Analyzed Iot Malware Detection And Forensics Via Network And Hardware Domains, Ziming Zhao, Zhaoxuan Li, Jiongchi Yu, Fan Zhang, Xiaofei Xie, Haitao Xu, Binbin Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the widespread use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, malware detection has become a hot spot for both academic and industrial communities. Existing approaches can be roughly categorized into network-side and host-side. However, existing network-side methods are difficult to capture contextual semantics from cross-source traffic, and previous host-side methods could be adversary-perceived and expose risks for tampering. More importantly, a single perspective cannot comprehensively track the multi-stage lifecycle of IoT malware. In this paper, we present CMD, a co-analyzed IoT malware detection and forensics system by combining hardware and network domains. For the network part, CMD proposes a tailored …

Enhancing Visual Grounding In Vision-Language Pre-Training With Position-Guided Text Prompts, Alex Jinpeng Wang, Pan Zhou, Mike Zheng Shou, Shuicheng Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Vision-Language Pre-Training (VLP) has demonstrated remarkable potential in aligning image and text pairs, paving the way for a wide range of cross-modal learning tasks. Nevertheless, we have observed that VLP models often fall short in terms of visual grounding and localization capabilities, which are crucial for many downstream tasks, such as visual reasoning. In response, we introduce a novel Position-guided Text Prompt ( PTP ) paradigm to bolster the visual grounding abilities of cross-modal models trained with VLP. In the VLP phase, PTP divides an image into N x N blocks and employs a widely-used object detector to identify objects …

Vaid: Indexing View Designs In Visual Analytics System, Lu Ying, Aoyu Wu, Haotian Li, Zikun Deng, Ji Lan, Jiang Wu, Yong Wang, Huamin Qu, Dazhen Deng, Yingcai Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Visual analytics (VA) systems have been widely used in various application domains. However, VA systems are complex in design, which imposes a serious problem: although the academic community constantly designs and implements new designs, the designs are difficult to query, understand, and refer to by subsequent designers. To mark a major step forward in tackling this problem, we index VA designs in an expressive and accessible way, transforming the designs into a structured format. We first conducted a workshop study with VA designers to learn user requirements for understanding and retrieving professional designs in VA systems. Thereafter, we came up …

Social Balance On Networks: Local Minima And Best-Edge Dynamics, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Jakub Svoboda, Dorde Zikelic, Andreas Pavlogiannis, Josef Tkadlec

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Structural balance theory is an established framework for studying social relationships of friendship and enmity. These relationships are modeled by a signed network whose energy potential measures the level of imbalance, while stochastic dynamics drives the network toward a state of minimum energy that captures social balance. It is known that this energy landscape has local minima that can trap socially aware dynamics, preventing it from reaching balance. Here we first study the robustness and attractor properties of these local minima. We show that a stochastic process can reach them from an abundance of initial states and that some local …

From Tweets To Token Sales: Assessing Ico Success Through Social Media Sentiments, Donghao Huang, S. Samuel, Quoc Toan Huynh, Zhaoxia Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the advent of social network technology, the influence of collective opinions has significantly impacted business, marketing, and fundraising. Particularly in the blockchain space, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) gain substantial exposure across various online platforms. Yet, the intricate relationships among these elements remain largely unexplored. This study aims to investigate the relationships between social media sentiment, engagement metrics, and ICO success. We hypothesize a positive correlation between favorable sentiment in ICO-related tweets and overall project success. Additionally, we recognize social media engagement indicators (mentions, retweets, likes, follower counts) as critical factors affecting ICO performance. Employing machine learning techniques, we conduct …

Exploring Diffusion Time-Steps For Unsupervised Representation Learning, Zhongqi Yue, Jiankun Wang, Qianru Sun, Lei Ji, Eric I-Chao Chang, Hanwang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Representation learning is all about discovering the hidden modular attributes that generate the data faithfully. We explore the potential of Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DM) in unsupervised learning of the modular attributes. We build a theoretical framework that connects the diffusion time-steps and the hidden attributes, which serves as an effective inductive bias for unsupervised learning. Specifically, the forward diffusion process incrementally adds Gaussian noise to samples at each time-step, which essentially collapses different samples into similar ones by losing attributes, e.g., fine-grained attributes such as texture are lost with less noise added (i.e., early time-steps), while coarse-grained ones such …

Regret-Based Defense In Adversarial Reinforcement Learning, Roman Belaire, Pradeep Varakantham, Thanh Hong Nguyen, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) policies are vulnerable to adversarial noise in observations, which can have disastrous consequences in safety-critical environments. For instance, a self-driving car receiving adversarially perturbed sensory observations about traffic signs (e.g., a stop sign physically altered to be perceived as a speed limit sign) can be fatal. Leading existing approaches for making RL algorithms robust to an observation-perturbing adversary have focused on (a) regularization approaches that make expected value objectives robust by adding adversarial loss terms; or (b) employing "maximin'' (i.e., maximizing the minimum value) notions of robustness. While regularization approaches are adept at reducing the probability …

Intriguing Properties Of Data Attribution On Diffusion Models, Xiaosen Zheng, Tianyu Pang, Chao Du, Jing Jiang, Xiaosen Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Data attribution seeks to trace model outputs back to training data. With the recent development of diffusion models, data attribution has become a desired module to properly assign valuations for high-quality or copyrighted training samples, ensuring that data contributors are fairly compensated or credited. Several theoretically motivated methods have been proposed to implement data attribution, in an effort to improve the trade-off between computational scalability and effectiveness. In this work, we conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies on attributing diffusion models, specifically focusing on DDPMs trained on CIFAR-10 and CelebA, as well as a Stable Diffusion model LoRA-finetuned on ArtBench. …

Collaborative Deep Reinforcement Learning For Solving Multi-Objective Vehicle Routing Problems, Yaoxin Wu, Mingfeng Fan, Zhiguang Cao, Ruobin Gao, Yaqing Hou, Guillaume Sartoretti

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods for multi-objective vehicle routing problems (MOVRPs) typically decompose an MOVRP into subproblems with respective preferences and then train policies to solve corresponding subproblems. However, such a paradigm is still less effective in tackling the intricate interactions among subproblems, thus holding back the quality of the Pareto solutions. To counteract this limitation, we introduce a collaborative deep reinforcement learning method. We first propose a preference-based attention network (PAN) that allows the DRL agents to reason out solutions to subproblems in parallel, where a shared encoder learns the instance embedding and a decoder is tailored for …

Deep Reinforcement Learning Guided Improvement Heuristic For Job Shop Scheduling, Cong Zhang, Zhiguang Cao, Wen Song, Yaoxin Wu, Jie Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent studies in using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to solve Job-shop scheduling problems (JSSP) focus on construction heuristics. However, their performance is still far from optimality, mainly because the underlying graph representation scheme is unsuitable for modelling partial solutions at each construction step. This paper proposes a novel DRL-guided improvement heuristic for solving JSSP, where graph representation is employed to encode complete solutions. We design a Graph-Neural-Network-based representation scheme, consisting of two modules to effectively capture the information of dynamic topology and different types of nodes in graphs encountered during the improvement process. To speed up solution evaluation during improvement, …

Extracting Relevant Test Inputs From Bug Reports For Automatic Test Case Generation, Wendkuuni C. Ouédraogo, Laura Plein, Kader Kaboré, Andrew Habib, Jacques Klein, David Lo, Tegawende F. Bissyandé

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The pursuit of automating software test case generation, particularly for unit tests, has become increasingly important due to the labor-intensive nature of manual test generation [6]. However, a significant challenge in this domain is the inability of automated approaches to generate relevant inputs, which compromises the efficacy of the tests [6].

Sequential Recommendation: From Representation Learning To Reasoning, Lei Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The recommender system is a crucial component of today's online services. It helps users navigate through an overwhelmingly large number of items and discovering those that interest them. Unlike general recommender systems, which recommend items based on the user's overall preferences, sequential recommender systems consider the order of user-item interactions. Sequential recommendations aim to predict the next item a user will interact with, given a sequence of previously interacted items, while considering the short-term and long-term dependencies among items.

In this thesis, we focus on sequential recommendation methods: from representation learning to large language model (LLM)-based reasoning. On the one …

Smu Libraries – An Enabling Partner In Ai Information Literacy, Samantha Seah, Zhe Benedict Yeo, Lukas Tschopp

Research Collection Library

SMU Libraries plays a pivotal role in advancing AI information literacy within the larger need for digital literacy skills in the SMU community. In this presentation, participants will get an overview of SMU Libraries' engagement and partnerships with the academic community and will showcase initiatives and resources supporting AI literacy. This includes a discussion of insights from the scholarly literature, research findings and critical perspectives to inform teaching and learning practices related to AI. Speakers will share SMU Libraries’ contributions towards awareness and adoption of AI through a portfolio of successful collaborations and initiatives with partners and stakeholders within and …

Implementation And Evaluation Of Ai-Based Citizen Question-Answer Recommender (Acqar) To Enhance Citizen Service Delivery In Singapore Public Sector: A Case Study, Hui Shan Lee

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Government agencies prioritize citizen service delivery to foster trust with the public. Technological advancements, particularly in Artificial Intelligence (AI), hold promise for improving service provision and aligning government operations with citizens' needs. Yet the inherent inflexibility of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) often overlooks the nuances of human emotions and the varied nature of citizen inquiries, exacerbated by a lack of tools to guide appropriate responses. This dissertation aims to address the gaps of overlook of human emotions and non-support for appropriate responses, by exploring the following questions: (1) Can a predictive model incorporating both numeric and textual data effectively forecast …

Assessing Ai Detectors In Identifying Ai-Generated Code: Implications For Education, Wei Hung Pan, Ming Jie Chok, Jonathan Leong Shan Wong, Yung Xin Shin, Yeong Shian Poon, Zhou Yang, Chun Yong Chong, David Lo, Mei Kuan Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Educators are increasingly concerned about the usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT in programming education, particularly regarding the potential exploitation of imperfections in Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) Detectors for academic misconduct.In this paper, we present an empirical study where the LLM is examined for its attempts to bypass detection by AIGC Detectors. This is achieved by generating code in response to a given question using different variants. We collected a dataset comprising 5,069 samples, with each sample consisting of a textual description of a coding problem and its corresponding human-written Python solution codes. These samples were …

Can Organizational Focus On Responsible Ai Lead To Improved Ai Adoption By Employees?, Seema Chokshi

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The duality inherent in Artificial Intelligence technology entails that while AI has the potential to bring about transformative benefits to organizations, unintended consequences of AI applications could lead to biased and discriminatory outcomes, which could have negative consequences for the organization and society in general. Concerns about such unintended consequences are an impediment to AI adoption where unwilling employees and practitioners often fear ethical breaches, thereby, negatively impacting their engagement with AI driven applications. In response to these concerns various organizations and regulatory bodies have developed governing frameworks broadly known as Responsible AI standards, that set guidelines to design, …

Mut: Human-In-The-Loop Unit Test Migration, Yi Gao, Xing Hu, Tongtong Xu, Xin Xia, David Lo, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Test migration, which enables the reuse of test cases crafted with knowledge and creativity by testers across various platforms and programming languages, has exhibited effectiveness in mobile app testing. However, unit test migration at the source code level has not garnered adequate attention and exploration. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-language and cross-platform test migration methodology, named MUT, which consists of four modules: code mapping, test case filtering, test case translation, and test case adaptation. MUT initially calculates code mappings to establish associations between source and target projects, and identifies suitable unit tests for migration from the source …

Marco: A Stochastic Asynchronous Concolic Explorer, Jie Hu, Yue Duan, Heng Yin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Concolic execution is a powerful program analysis technique for code path exploration. Despite recent advances that greatly improved the efficiency of concolic execution engines, path constraint solving remains a major bottleneck of concolic testing. An intelligent scheduler for inputs/branches becomes even more crucial. Our studies show that the previously under-studied branch-flipping policy adopted by state-of-the-art concolic execution engines has several limitations. We propose to assess each branch by its potential for new code coverage from a global view, concerning the path divergence probability at each branch. To validate this idea, we implemented a prototype Marco and evaluated it against the …

Redriver: Runtime Enforcement For Autonomous Vehicles, Yang Sun, Christopher M. Poskitt, Xiaodong Zhang, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Autonomous driving systems (ADSs) integrate sensing, perception, drive control, and several other critical tasks in autonomous vehicles, motivating research into techniques for assessing their safety. While there are several approaches for testing and analysing them in high-fidelity simulators, ADSs may still encounter additional critical scenarios beyond those covered once they are deployed on real roads. An additional level of confidence can be established by monitoring and enforcing critical properties when the ADS is running. Existing work, however, is only able to monitor simple safety properties (e.g., avoidance of collisions) and is limited to blunt enforcement mechanisms such as hitting the …

Acav: A Framework For Automatic Causality Analysis In Autonomous Vehicle Accident Recordings, Huijia Sun, Christopher M. Poskitt, Yang Sun, Jun Sun, Yuqi Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rapid progress of autonomous vehicles (AVs) has brought the prospect of a driverless future closer than ever. Recent fatalities, however, have emphasized the importance of safety validation through large-scale testing. Multiple approaches achieve this fully automatically using high-fidelity simulators, i.e., by generating diverse driving scenarios and evaluating autonomous driving systems (ADSs) against different test oracles. While effective at finding violations, these approaches do not identify the decisions and actions that caused them -- information that is critical for improving the safety of ADSs. To address this challenge, we propose ACAV, an automated framework designed to conduct causality analysis for …

Flgan: Gan-Based Unbiased Federated Learning Under Non-Iid Settings, Zhuoran Ma, Yang Liu, Yinbin Miao, Guowen Xu, Ximeng Liu, Jianfeng Ma, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Federated Learning (FL) suffers from low convergence and significant accuracy loss due to local biases caused by non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non-IID) data. To enhance the non-IID FL performance, a straightforward idea is to leverage the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to mitigate local biases using synthesized samples. Unfortunately, existing GAN-based solutions have inherent limitations, which do not support non-IID data and even compromise user privacy. To tackle the above issues, we propose a GAN-based unbiased FL scheme, called FlGan, to mitigate local biases using synthesized samples generated by GAN while preserving user-level privacy in the FL setting. Specifically, FlGan first …

Exploring The Potential Of Chatgpt In Automated Code Refinement: An Empirical Study, Qi Guo, Shangqing Liu, Junming Cao, Xiaohong Li, Xin Peng, Xiaofei Xie, Bihuan Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code review is an essential activity for ensuring the quality and maintainability of software projects. However, it is a time-consuming and often error-prone task that can significantly impact the development process. Recently, ChatGPT, a cutting-edge language model, has demonstrated impressive performance in various natural language processing tasks, suggesting its potential to automate code review processes. However, it is still unclear how well ChatGPT performs in code review tasks. To fill this gap, in this paper, we conduct the first empirical study to understand the capabilities of ChatGPT in code review tasks, specifically focusing on automated code refinement based on given …

Towards Low-Resource Rumor Detection: Unified Contrastive Transfer With Propagation Structure, Hongzhan Lin, Jing Ma, Ruichao Yang, Zhiwei Yang, Mingfei Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The truth is significantly hampered by massive rumors that spread along with breaking news or popular topics. Since there is sufficient corpus gathered from the same domain for model training, existing rumor detection algorithms show promising performance on yesterday's news. However, due to a lack of substantial training data and prior expert knowledge, they are poor at spotting rumors concerning unforeseen events, especially those propagated in different languages (i.e., low-resource regimes). In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework with unified contrastive transfer learning, to detect rumors by adapting the features learned from well-resourced rumor data to that …

Teaching Software Development For Real-World Problems Using A Microservice-Based Collaborative Problem-Solving Approach, Yi Meng Lau, Christian Michael Koh, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Experienced and skillful software developers are needed in organizations to develop software products effective for their business with shortened time-to-market. Such developers will not only need to code but also be able to work in teams and collaboratively solve real-world problems that organizations arefacing. It is challenging for educators to nurture students to become such developers with strong technical, social, and cognitive skills. Towards addressing the challenge, this study presents a Collaborative Software Development Project Framework for a course that focuses on learning microservices architectures anddeveloping a software application for a real-world business. Students get to work in teams to …

Experience Report: Identifying Common Misconceptions And Errors Of Novice Programmers With Chatgpt, Hua Leong Fwa

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Identifying the misconceptions of novice programmers is pertinent for informing instructors of the challenges faced by their students in learning computer programming. In the current literature, custom tools, test scripts were developed and, in most cases, manual effort to go through the individual codes were required to identify and categorize the errors latent within the students' code submissions. This entails investment of substantial effort and time from the instructors. In this study, we thus propose the use of ChatGPT in identifying and categorizing the errors. Using prompts that were seeded only with the student's code and the model code solution …

Improving Automated Code Reviews: Learning From Experience, Hong Yi Lin, Patanamon Thongtanunam, Christoph Treude, Wachiraphan Charoenwet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modern code review is a critical quality assurance process that is widely adopted in both industry and open source software environments. This process can help newcomers learn from the feedback of experienced reviewers; however, it often brings a large workload and stress to reviewers. To alleviate this burden, the field of automated code reviews aims to automate the process, teaching large language models to provide reviews on submitted code, just as a human would. A recent approach pre-trained and fine-tuned the code intelligent language model on a large-scale code review corpus. However, such techniques did not fully utilise quality reviews …

Encoding Version History Context For Better Code Representation, Huy Nguyen, Christoph Treude, Patanamon Thongtanunam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the exponential growth of AI tools that generate source code, understanding software has become crucial. When developers comprehend a program, they may refer to additional contexts to look for information, e.g. program documentation or historical code versions. Therefore, we argue that encoding this additional contextual information could also benefit code representation for deep learning. Recent papers incorporate contextual data (e.g. call hierarchy) into vector representation to address program comprehension problems. This motivates further studies to explore additional contexts, such as version history, to enhance models' understanding of programs. That is, insights from version history enable recognition of patterns in …

Dronlomaly: Runtime Log-Based Anomaly Detector For Dji Drones, Wei Minn, Naing Tun Yan, Lwin Khin Shar, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present an automated tool for realtime detection of anomalous behaviors while a DJI drone is executing a flight mission. The tool takes sensor data logged by drone at fixed time intervals and performs anomaly detection using a Bi-LSTM model. The model is trained on baseline flight logs from a successful mission physically or via a simulator. The tool has two modules --- the first module is responsible for sending the log data to the remote controller station, and the second module is run as a service in the remote controller station powered by a Bi-LSTM model, which receives the …

My Github Sponsors Profile Is Live!": Investigating The Impact Of Twitter/X Mentions On Github Sponsors, Youmei Fan, Tao Xiao, Hideaki Hata, Christoph Treude, Kenichi Matsumoto

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

GitHub Sponsors was launched in 2019, enabling donations to opensource software developers to provide financial support, as per GitHub’s slogan: “Invest in the projects you depend on”. However, a 2022 study on GitHub Sponsors found that only two-fifths of developers who were seeking sponsorship received a donation. The study found that, other than internal actions (such as offering perks to sponsors), developers had advertised their GitHub Sponsors profiles on social media, such as Twitter (also known as X). Therefore, in this work, we investigate the impact of tweets that contain links to GitHub Sponsors profiles on sponsorship, as well as …

Classifying Source Code: How Far Can Compressor-Based Classifiers Go?, Zhou Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Pre-trained language models of code, which are built upon large-scale datasets, millions of trainable parameters, and high computational resources cost, have achieved phenomenal success. Recently, researchers have proposed a compressor-based classifier (Cbc); it trains no parameters but is found to outperform BERT. We conduct the first empirical study to explore whether this lightweight alternative can accurately classify source code. Our study is more than applying Cbc to code-related tasks. We first identify an issue that the original implementation overestimates Cbc. After correction, Cbc's performance on defect prediction drops from 80.7% to 63.0%, which is still comparable to CodeBERT (63.7%). We …