Learning to Correction: Explainable Feedback Generation for Visual Commonsense Reasoning Distractor

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have shown remarkable performance in the visual commonsense reasoning (VCR) task, which aims to answer a multiple-choice question based on visual commonsense within an image. However, the ability of LMMs to correct potential visual commonsense errors in the distractor upon their occurrence is yet under-explored. Drawing inspiration from how a human teacher crafts challenging distractors to test students' comprehension of the concepts or skills and assists them in identifying and correcting errors toward the answer, we are the pioneering research for LMMs to simulate this error correction process. To this end, we employ GPT-4 as a ``teacher'' to collect the explainable feedback dataset VCR-DF for error correction, which serves as a benchmark to evaluate the ability of LMMs to identify misconceptions and clarify reasons behind the error in VCR distractors toward final answers. In addition, we propose an LMM-based Pedagogical Expert Instructed Feedback Generation (PEIFG) model to incorporate the learnable expert prompts and multimodal instruction as guidance for feedback generation. Experimental results show that our PEIFG significantly outperforms existing LMMs. We believe that our benchmark provides a new direction for evaluating the capabilities of LMMs.

Transparent Neighborhood Approximation for Text Classifier Explanation

Recent literature highlights the critical role of neighborhood construction in deriving model-agnostic explanations, with a growing trend toward deploying generative models to improve synthetic instance quality, especially for explaining text classifiers. These approaches overcome the challenges in neighborhood construction posed by the unstructured nature of texts, thereby improving the quality of explanations. However, the deployed generators are usually implemented via neural networks and lack inherent explainability, sparking arguments over the transparency of the explanation process itself. To address this limitation while preserving neighborhood quality, this paper introduces a probability-based editing method as an alternative to black-box text generators. This approach generates neighboring texts by implementing manipulations based on in-text contexts. Substituting the generator-based construction process with recursive probability-based editing, the resultant explanation method, XPROB (explainer with probability-based editing), exhibits competitive performance according to the evaluation conducted on two real-world datasets. Additionally, XPROB's fully transparent and more controllable construction process leads to superior stability compared to the generator-based explainers.

Disco Intelligent Omni-Surfaces: 360-degree Fully-Passive Jamming Attacks

Intelligent omni-surfaces (IOSs) with 360-degree electromagnetic radiation significantly improves the performance of wireless systems, while an adversarial IOS also poses a significant potential risk for physical layer security. In this paper, we propose a "DISCO" IOS (DIOS) based fully-passive jammer (FPJ) that can launch omnidirectional fully-passive jamming attacks. In the proposed DIOS-based FPJ, the interrelated refractive and reflective (R&R) coefficients of the adversarial IOS are randomly generated, acting like a "DISCO" that distributes wireless energy radiated by the base station. By introducing active channel aging (ACA) during channel coherence time, the DIOS-based FPJ can perform omnidirectional fully-passive jamming without neither jamming power nor channel knowledge of legitimate users (LUs). To characterize the impact of the DIOS-based PFJ, we derive the statistical characteristics of DIOS-jammed channels based on two widely-used IOS models, i.e., the constant-amplitude model and the variable-amplitude model. Consequently, the asymptotic analysis of the ergodic achievable sum rates under the DIOS-based omnidirectional fully-passive jamming is given based on the derived stochastic characteristics for both the two IOS models. Based on the derived analysis, the omnidirectional jamming impact of the proposed DIOS-based FPJ implemented by a constant-amplitude IOS does not depend on either the quantization number or the stochastic distribution of the DIOS coefficients, while the conclusion does not hold on when a variable-amplitude IOS is used. Numerical results based on one-bit quantization of the IOS phase shifts are provided to verify the effectiveness of the derived theoretical analysis. The proposed DIOS-based FPJ can not only launch omnidirectional fully-passive jamming, but also improve the jamming impact by about 55% at 10 dBm transmit power per LU.

Few-Shot Joint Multimodal Entity-Relation Extraction via Knowledge-Enhanced Cross-modal Prompt Model

Joint Multimodal Entity-Relation Extraction (JMERE) is a challenging task that aims to extract entities and their relations from text-image pairs in social media posts. Existing methods for JMERE require large amounts of labeled data. However, gathering and annotating fine-grained multimodal data for JMERE poses significant challenges. Initially, we construct diverse and comprehensive multimodal few-shot datasets fitted to the original data distribution. To address the insufficient information in the few-shot setting, we introduce the \textbf{K}nowledge-\textbf{E}nhanced \textbf{C}ross-modal \textbf{P}rompt \textbf{M}odel (KECPM) for JMERE. This method can effectively address the problem of insufficient information in the few-shot setting by guiding a large language model to generate supplementary background knowledge. Our proposed method comprises two stages: (1) a knowledge ingestion stage that dynamically formulates prompts based on semantic similarity guide ChatGPT generating relevant knowledge and employs self-reflection to refine the knowledge; (2) a knowledge-enhanced language model stage that merges the auxiliary knowledge with the original input and utilizes a transformer-based model to align with JMERE's required output format. We extensively evaluate our approach on a few-shot dataset derived from the JMERE dataset, demonstrating its superiority over strong baselines in terms of both micro and macro F$_1$ scores. Additionally, we present qualitative analyses and case studies to elucidate the effectiveness of our model.

Landmark-guided Diffusion Model for High-fidelity and Temporally Coherent Talking Head Generation

Audio-driven talking head generation is a significant and challenging task applicable to various fields such as virtual avatars, film production, and online conferences. However, the existing GAN-based models emphasize generating well-synchronized lip shapes but overlook the visual quality of generated frames, while diffusion-based models prioritize generating high-quality frames but neglect lip shape matching, resulting in jittery mouth movements. To address the aforementioned problems, we introduce a two-stage diffusion-based model. The first stage involves generating synchronized facial landmarks based on the given speech. In the second stage, these generated landmarks serve as a condition in the denoising process, aiming to optimize mouth jitter issues and generate high-fidelity, well-synchronized, and temporally coherent talking head videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model yields the best performance.

Is Your AI-Generated Code Really Safe? Evaluating Large Language Models on Secure Code Generation with CodeSecEval

Large language models (LLMs) have brought significant advancements to code generation and code repair, benefiting both novice and experienced developers. However, their training using unsanitized data from open-source repositories, like GitHub, raises the risk of inadvertently propagating security vulnerabilities. Despite numerous studies investigating the safety of code LLMs, there remains a gap in comprehensively addressing their security features. In this work, we aim to present a comprehensive study aimed at precisely evaluating and enhancing the security aspects of code LLMs. To support our research, we introduce CodeSecEval, a meticulously curated dataset designed to address 44 critical vulnerability types with 180 distinct samples. CodeSecEval serves as the foundation for the automatic evaluation of code models in two crucial tasks: code generation and code repair, with a strong emphasis on security. Our experimental results reveal that current models frequently overlook security issues during both code generation and repair processes, resulting in the creation of vulnerable code. In response, we propose different strategies that leverage vulnerability-aware information and insecure code explanations to mitigate these security vulnerabilities. Furthermore, our findings highlight that certain vulnerability types particularly challenge model performance, influencing their effectiveness in real-world applications. Based on these findings, we believe our study will have a positive impact on the software engineering community, inspiring the development of improved methods for training and utilizing LLMs, thereby leading to safer and more trustworthy model deployment.

Is Your AI-Generated Code Really Secure? Evaluating Large Language Models on Secure Code Generation with CodeSecEval

Large language models (LLMs) have brought significant advancements to code generation and code repair, benefiting both novice and experienced developers. However, their training using unsanitized data from open-source repositories, like GitHub, raises the risk of inadvertently propagating security vulnerabilities. Despite numerous studies investigating the safety of code LLMs, there remains a gap in comprehensively addressing their security features. In this work, we aim to present a comprehensive study aimed at precisely evaluating and enhancing the security aspects of code LLMs. To support our research, we introduce CodeSecEval, a meticulously curated dataset designed to address 44 critical vulnerability types with 180 distinct samples. CodeSecEval serves as the foundation for the automatic evaluation of code models in two crucial tasks: code generation and code repair, with a strong emphasis on security. Our experimental results reveal that current models frequently overlook security issues during both code generation and repair processes, resulting in the creation of vulnerable code. In response, we propose different strategies that leverage vulnerability-aware information and insecure code explanations to mitigate these security vulnerabilities. Furthermore, our findings highlight that certain vulnerability types particularly challenge model performance, influencing their effectiveness in real-world applications. Based on these findings, we believe our study will have a positive impact on the software engineering community, inspiring the development of improved methods for training and utilizing LLMs, thereby leading to safer and more trustworthy model deployment.

Towards Effective Time-Aware Language Representation: Exploring Enhanced Temporal Understanding in Language Models

In the evolving field of Natural Language Processing, understanding the temporal context of text is increasingly crucial. This study investigates methods to incorporate temporal information during pre-training, aiming to achieve effective time-aware language representation for improved performance on time-related tasks. In contrast to common pre-trained models like BERT, which rely on synchronic document collections such as BookCorpus and Wikipedia, our research introduces BiTimeBERT 2.0, a novel language model pre-trained on a temporal news article collection. BiTimeBERT 2.0 utilizes this temporal news collection, focusing on three innovative pre-training objectives: Time-Aware Masked Language Modeling (TAMLM), Document Dating (DD), and Time-Sensitive Entity Replacement (TSER). Each objective targets a unique aspect of temporal information. TAMLM is designed to enhance the understanding of temporal contexts and relations, DD integrates document timestamps as chronological markers, and TSER focuses on the temporal dynamics of "Person" entities, recognizing their inherent temporal significance. The experimental results consistently demonstrate that BiTimeBERT 2.0 outperforms models like BERT and other existing pre-trained models, achieving substantial gains across a variety of downstream NLP tasks and applications where time plays a pivotal role.

Integrated Sensing and Communication Under DISCO Physical-Layer Jamming Attacks

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems traditionally presuppose that sensing and communication (S&C) channels remain approximately constant during their coherence time. However, a "DISCO" reconfigurable intelligent surface (DRIS), i.e., an illegitimate RIS with random, time-varying reflection properties that acts like a "disco ball," introduces a paradigm shift that enables active channel aging more rapidly during the channel coherence time. In this letter, we investigate the impact of DISCO jamming attacks launched by a DRISbased fully-passive jammer (FPJ) on an ISAC system. Specifically, an ISAC problem formulation and a corresponding waveform optimization are presented in which the ISAC waveform design considers the trade-off between the S&C performance and is formulated as a Pareto optimization problem. Moreover, a theoretical analysis is conducted to quantify the impact of DISCO jamming attacks. Numerical results are presented to evaluate the S&C performance under DISCO jamming attacks and to validate the derived theoretical analysis.

A Logical Pattern Memory Pre-trained Model for Entailment Tree Generation

Generating coherent and credible explanations remains a significant challenge in the field of AI. In recent years, researchers have delved into the utilization of entailment trees to depict explanations, which exhibit a reasoning process of how a hypothesis is deduced from the supporting facts. However, existing models often overlook the importance of generating intermediate conclusions with logical consistency from the given facts, leading to inaccurate conclusions and undermining the overall credibility of entailment trees. To address this limitation, we propose the logical pattern memory pre-trained model (LMPM). LMPM incorporates an external memory structure to learn and store the latent representations of logical patterns, which aids in generating logically consistent conclusions. Furthermore, to mitigate the influence of logically irrelevant domain knowledge in the Wikipedia-based data, we introduce an entity abstraction approach to construct the dataset for pre-training LMPM. The experimental results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in improving the quality of entailment tree generation. By leveraging logical entailment patterns, our model produces more coherent and reasonable conclusions that closely align with the underlying premises. Code and Data are released at https://github.com/YuanLi95/T5-LMPM