LLM App Squatting and Cloning

Impersonation tactics, such as app squatting and app cloning, have posed longstanding challenges in mobile app stores, where malicious actors exploit the names and reputations of popular apps to deceive users. With the rapid growth of Large Language Model (LLM) stores like GPT Store and FlowGPT, these issues have similarly surfaced, threatening the integrity of the LLM app ecosystem. In this study, we present the first large-scale analysis of LLM app squatting and cloning using our custom-built tool, LLMappCrazy. LLMappCrazy covers 14 squatting generation techniques and integrates Levenshtein distance and BERT-based semantic analysis to detect cloning by analyzing app functional similarities. Using this tool, we generated variations of the top 1000 app names and found over 5,000 squatting apps in the dataset. Additionally, we observed 3,509 squatting apps and 9,575 cloning cases across six major platforms. After sampling, we find that 18.7% of the squatting apps and 4.9% of the cloning apps exhibited malicious behavior, including phishing, malware distribution, fake content dissemination, and aggressive ad injection.

GPT-4o System Card

GPT-4o is an autoregressive omni model that accepts as input any combination of text, audio, image, and video, and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs. It's trained end-to-end across text, vision, and audio, meaning all inputs and outputs are processed by the same neural network. GPT-4o can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, which is similar to human response time in conversation. It matches GPT-4 Turbo performance on text in English and code, with significant improvement on text in non-English languages, while also being much faster and 50\% cheaper in the API. GPT-4o is especially better at vision and audio understanding compared to existing models. In line with our commitment to building AI safely and consistent with our voluntary commitments to the White House, we are sharing the GPT-4o System Card, which includes our Preparedness Framework evaluations. In this System Card, we provide a detailed look at GPT-4o's capabilities, limitations, and safety evaluations across multiple categories, focusing on speech-to-speech while also evaluating text and image capabilities, and measures we've implemented to ensure the model is safe and aligned. We also include third-party assessments on dangerous capabilities, as well as discussion of potential societal impacts of GPT-4o's text and vision capabilities.

Efficient and Effective Universal Adversarial Attack against Vision-Language Pre-training Models

Vision-language pre-training (VLP) models, trained on large-scale image-text pairs, have become widely used across a variety of downstream vision-and-language (V+L) tasks. This widespread adoption raises concerns about their vulnerability to adversarial attacks. Non-universal adversarial attacks, while effective, are often impractical for real-time online applications due to their high computational demands per data instance. Recently, universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs) have been introduced as a solution, but existing generator-based UAP methods are significantly time-consuming. To overcome the limitation, we propose a direct optimization-based UAP approach, termed DO-UAP, which significantly reduces resource consumption while maintaining high attack performance. Specifically, we explore the necessity of multimodal loss design and introduce a useful data augmentation strategy. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark VLP datasets, six popular VLP models, and three classical downstream tasks demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of DO-UAP. Specifically, our approach drastically decreases the time consumption by 23-fold while achieving a better attack performance.

LLM$\times$MapReduce: Simplified Long-Sequence Processing using Large Language Models

Enlarging the context window of large language models (LLMs) has become a crucial research area, particularly for applications involving extremely long texts. In this work, we propose a novel training-free framework for processing long texts, utilizing a divide-and-conquer strategy to achieve comprehensive document understanding. The proposed LLM$\times$MapReduce framework splits the entire document into several chunks for LLMs to read and then aggregates the intermediate answers to produce the final output. The main challenge for divide-and-conquer long text processing frameworks lies in the risk of losing essential long-range information when splitting the document, which can lead the model to produce incomplete or incorrect answers based on the segmented texts. Disrupted long-range information can be classified into two categories: inter-chunk dependency and inter-chunk conflict. We design a structured information protocol to better cope with inter-chunk dependency and an in-context confidence calibration mechanism to resolve inter-chunk conflicts. Experimental results demonstrate that LLM$\times$MapReduce can outperform representative open-source and commercial long-context LLMs, and is applicable to several different models.

A Benchmark on Directed Graph Representation Learning in Hardware Designs

To keep pace with the rapid advancements in design complexity within modern computing systems, directed graph representation learning (DGRL) has become crucial, particularly for encoding circuit netlists, computational graphs, and developing surrogate models for hardware performance prediction. However, DGRL remains relatively unexplored, especially in the hardware domain, mainly due to the lack of comprehensive and user-friendly benchmarks. This study presents a novel benchmark comprising five hardware design datasets and 13 prediction tasks spanning various levels of circuit abstraction. We evaluate 21 DGRL models, employing diverse graph neural networks and graph transformers (GTs) as backbones, enhanced by positional encodings (PEs) tailored for directed graphs. Our results highlight that bidirected (BI) message passing neural networks (MPNNs) and robust PEs significantly enhance model performance. Notably, the top-performing models include PE-enhanced GTs interleaved with BI-MPNN layers and BI-Graph Isomorphism Network, both surpassing baselines across the 13 tasks. Additionally, our investigation into out-of-distribution (OOD) performance emphasizes the urgent need to improve OOD generalization in DGRL models. This benchmark, implemented with a modular codebase, streamlines the evaluation of DGRL models for both hardware and ML practitioners

NEAT: Nonlinear Parameter-efficient Adaptation of Pre-trained Models

Fine-tuning pre-trained models is crucial for adapting large models to downstream tasks, often delivering state-of-the-art performance. However, fine-tuning all model parameters is resource-intensive and laborious, leading to the emergence of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods. One widely adopted PEFT technique, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), freezes the pre-trained model weights and introduces two low-rank matrices whose ranks are significantly smaller than the dimensions of the original weight matrices. This enables efficient fine-tuning by adjusting only a small number of parameters. Despite its efficiency, LoRA approximates weight updates using low-rank decomposition, which struggles to capture complex, non-linear components and efficient optimization trajectories. As a result, LoRA-based methods often exhibit a significant performance gap compared to full fine-tuning. Closing this gap requires higher ranks, which increases the number of parameters. To address these limitations, we propose a nonlinear parameter-efficient adaptation method (NEAT). NEAT introduces a lightweight neural network that takes pre-trained weights as input and learns a nonlinear transformation to approximate cumulative weight updates. These updates can be interpreted as functions of the corresponding pre-trained weights. The nonlinear approximation directly models the cumulative updates, effectively capturing complex and non-linear structures in the weight updates. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates taht NEAT can be more efficient than LoRA while having equal or greater expressivity. Extensive evaluations across four benchmarks and over twenty datasets demonstrate that NEAT significantly outperforms baselines in both vision and text tasks.

Melody Is All You Need For Music Generation

We present the Melody Guided Music Generation (MMGen) model, the first novel approach using melody to guide the music generation that, despite a pretty simple method and extremely limited resources, achieves excellent performance. Specifically, we first align the melody with audio waveforms and their associated descriptions using the multimodal alignment module. Subsequently, we condition the diffusion module on the learned melody representations. This allows MMGen to generate music that matches the style of the provided audio while also producing music that reflects the content of the given text description. To address the scarcity of high-quality data, we construct a multi-modal dataset, MusicSet, which includes melody, text, and audio, and will be made publicly available. We conduct extensive experiments which demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model both in terms of experimental metrics and actual performance quality.

Energy-Efficient Computation with DVFS using Deep Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Task Systems in Edge Computing

Periodic soft real-time systems have broad applications in many areas, such as IoT. Finding an optimal energy-efficient policy that is adaptable to underlying edge devices while meeting deadlines for tasks has always been challenging. This research studies generalized systems with multi-task, multi-deadline scenarios with reinforcement learning-based DVFS for energy saving. This work addresses the limitation of previous work that models a periodic system as a single task and single-deadline scenario, which is too simplified to cope with complex situations. The method encodes time series information in the Linux kernel into information that is easy to use for reinforcement learning, allowing the system to generate DVFS policies to adapt system patterns based on the general workload. For encoding, we present two different methods for comparison. Both methods use only one performance counter: system utilization and the kernel only needs minimal information from the userspace. Our method is implemented on Jetson Nano Board (2GB) and is tested with three fixed multitask workloads, which are three, five, and eight tasks in the workload, respectively. For randomness and generalization, we also designed a random workload generator to build different multitask workloads to test. Based on the test results, our method could save 3%-10% power compared to Linux built-in governors.

Cross-video Identity Correlating for Person Re-identification Pre-training

Recent researches have proven that pre-training on large-scale person images extracted from internet videos is an effective way in learning better representations for person re-identification. However, these researches are mostly confined to pre-training at the instance-level or single-video tracklet-level. They ignore the identity-invariance in images of the same person across different videos, which is a key focus in person re-identification. To address this issue, we propose a Cross-video Identity-cOrrelating pre-traiNing (CION) framework. Defining a noise concept that comprehensively considers both intra-identity consistency and inter-identity discrimination, CION seeks the identity correlation from cross-video images by modeling it as a progressive multi-level denoising problem. Furthermore, an identity-guided self-distillation loss is proposed to implement better large-scale pre-training by mining the identity-invariance within person images. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the superiority of our CION in terms of efficiency and performance. CION achieves significantly leading performance with even fewer training samples. For example, compared with the previous state-of-the-art~\cite{ISR}, CION with the same ResNet50-IBN achieves higher mAP of 93.3\% and 74.3\% on Market1501 and MSMT17, while only utilizing 8\% training samples. Finally, with CION demonstrating superior model-agnostic ability, we contribute a model zoo named ReIDZoo to meet diverse research and application needs in this field. It contains a series of CION pre-trained models with spanning structures and parameters, totaling 32 models with 10 different structures, including GhostNet, ConvNext, RepViT, FastViT and so on. The code and models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Zplusdragon/CION_ReIDZoo.

EmoPro: A Prompt Selection Strategy for Emotional Expression in LM-based Speech Synthesis

Recent advancements in speech synthesis models, trained on extensive datasets, have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities. These models can control content, timbre, and emotion in generated speech based on prompt inputs. Despite these advancements, the choice of prompts significantly impacts the output quality, yet most existing selection schemes do not adequately address the control of emotional intensity. To address this question, this paper proposes a two-stage prompt selection strategy EmoPro, which is specifically designed for emotionally controllable speech synthesis. This strategy focuses on selecting highly expressive and high-quality prompts by evaluating them from four perspectives: emotional expression strength, speech quality, text-emotion consistency, and model generation performance. Experimental results show that prompts selected using the proposed method result in more emotionally expressive and engaging synthesized speech compared to those obtained through baseline. Audio samples and codes will be available at https://whyrrrrun.github.io/EmoPro/.