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Qian Li

Publications and source records attributed to Qian Li.

At least 199 records · Page 11Linked to original sources
arXiv2023

Hard Adversarial Example Mining for Improving Robust Fairness

Adversarial training (AT) is widely considered the state-of-the-art technique for improving the robustness of deep neural networks (DNNs) against adversarial examples (AE). Nevertheless, recent studies have revealed that adversarially trained models are prone to unfairness problems, restricting their applicability. In this paper, we empirically observe that this limitation may be attributed to serious adversarial confidence overfitting, i.e., certain adversarial examples with overconfidence. To alleviate this problem, we propose HAM, a straightforward yet effective framework via adaptive Hard Adversarial example Mining.HAM concentrates on mining hard adversarial examples while discarding the easy ones in an adaptive fashion. Specifically, HAM identifies hard AEs in terms of their step sizes needed to cross the decision boundary when calculating loss value. Besides, an early-dropping mechanism is incorporated to discard the easy examples at the initial stages of AE generation, resulting in efficient AT. Extensive experimental results on CIFAR-10, SVHN, and Imagenette demonstrate that HAM achieves significant improvement in robust fairness while reducing computational cost compared to several state-of-the-art adversarial training methods. The code will be made publicly available.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Exploring Antitrust and Platform Power in Generative AI

The concentration of power in a few digital technology companies has become a subject of increasing interest in both academic and non-academic discussions. One of the most noteworthy contributions to the debate is Lina Khan's Amazon's Antitrust Paradox. In this work, Khan contends that Amazon has systematically exerted its dominance in online retail to eliminate competitors and subsequently charge above-market prices. This work contributed to Khan's appointment as the chair of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), one of the most influential antitrust organisations. Today, several ongoing antitrust lawsuits in the US and Europe involve major technology companies like Apple, Google/Alphabet, and Facebook/Meta. In the realm of generative AI, we are once again witnessing the same companies taking the lead in technological advancements, leaving little room for others to compete. This article examines the market dominance of these corporations in the technology stack behind generative AI from an antitrust law perspective.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Counterfactual Explanation for Fairness in Recommendation

Fairness-aware recommendation eliminates discrimination issues to build trustworthy recommendation systems.Explaining the causes of unfair recommendations is critical, as it promotes fairness diagnostics, and thus secures users' trust in recommendation models. Existing fairness explanation methods suffer high computation burdens due to the large-scale search space and the greedy nature of the explanation search process. Besides, they perform score-based optimizations with continuous values, which are not applicable to discrete attributes such as gender and race. In this work, we adopt the novel paradigm of counterfactual explanation from causal inference to explore how minimal alterations in explanations change model fairness, to abandon the greedy search for explanations. We use real-world attributes from Heterogeneous Information Networks (HINs) to empower counterfactual reasoning on discrete attributes. We propose a novel Counterfactual Explanation for Fairness (CFairER) that generates attribute-level counterfactual explanations from HINs for recommendation fairness. Our CFairER conducts off-policy reinforcement learning to seek high-quality counterfactual explanations, with an attentive action pruning reducing the search space of candidate counterfactuals. The counterfactual explanations help to provide rational and proximate explanations for model fairness, while the attentive action pruning narrows the search space of attributes. Extensive experiments demonstrate our proposed model can generate faithful explanations while maintaining favorable recommendation performance.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2023

Thermal fluctuation, deflection angle and greybody factor of a high-dimensional Schwarzschild black hole in STVG

In this work, we study the thermal fluctuation, deflection angle and greybody factor of the high-dimensional Schwarzschild black hole in scalar-tensor-vector gravity (STVG). Based on the correction of black hole entropy due to thermal fluctuation, we calculate some thermodynamic quantities associated with the correction of black hole entropy. The influence of the first-order and second-order corrections, spacetime dimensionality and STVG parameters on these thermodynamics quantities are discussed in detail. Additionally, by utilizing the Gauss-Bonnet theorem, the deflection angle is obtained in the weak field limit and the effect of two parameters on the results is visualized. Finally, we calculate the bounds on greybody factors of a massless scalar field.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2023

Weak gravitational lensing by an ESTGB black hole in the presence of a plasma

This paper is devoted to studying the weak-field gravitational lensing properties of a 4D ESTGB black hole, which is surrounded by the plasma medium. The effects of the magnetic charges and the three plasma distribution models in the deflection of light around a 4D ESTGB black hole are investigated in detail. We find that the uniform plasma leads to a larger deflection of light rays in comparison with the singular isothermal sphere (SIS), the non-singular isothermal sphere (NSIS) models. Moreover, the deflection angle increases slightly as the absolute value of the magnetic charge decreases. Finally, we analyze the total magnification of image due to weak gravitational lensing around the black hole. The result shows that the presence of a uniform plasma medium remarkably enhances the total magnification whereas the non-uniform plasma reduces the total magnification.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2023

Gray-body factor and absorption of the Dirac field in ESTGB gravity

The gray-body factor and the absorption cross section of the 4D ESTGB gravity with a mode of nonlinear electrodynamics for the massless Dirac field are studied in this paper. The magnetic charge value varies between $-2^{(\frac{5}{3})}/3$ and $0$ as well as the ADM mass is set to $1$, which corresponds to a non-extreme black hole. The gray-body factor is obtained using the semi-analytic WKB method after solving the massless Dirac equation. When the absolute value of magnetic charge is increasing, the gray-body factor $γ(ω)$ is decreasing. In addition, the partial absorption cross section and the total absorption cross section are calculated by using the partial wave method. We find that the maximum value of partial absorption cross section decreases as $κ$ increases. And the existence of magnetic charge causes the diminishing of the total absorption cross section. Finally, we find that the absorption cross section of the Dirac field is more sensitive to electric charge than magnetic charge by comparing the absorption cross section of the Reissner-Nordstr$\rm\ddot{o}$m and ESTGB-NLED black holes.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2023

Shadow, absorption and Hawking radiation of a Schwarzschild black hole surrounded by a cloud of strings in Rastall gravity

This paper studies the black hole shadow, absorption cross section, and Hawking radiation of a massless scalar field in the background of a static spherically symmetric black hole spacetime that is surrounded by a cloud of strings in Rastall gravity. Specifically, the effects of the parameters $a$ and $β$ on the photon sphere and shadow radii are investigated. The results show that as the negative parameter $β$ decreases, the photon sphere and shadow radii change in an N-shape. In addition, the absorption cross section obtained after solving the massless Klein-Gordon equation is calculated using the sinc approximation and the partial waves method. We compare the absorption cross section obtained by the sinc approximation and the partial waves method, and find it to be exceptionally consistent in the mid-to-high frequency region. Furthermore, the effects of parameters $a$ and $β$ on absorption are examined in detail. Finally, we study in detail the effects of the parameters $a$, $β$ and $l$ on the Hawking radiation power emission spectrum of the considered black hole. It turns out that the string parameter $a$ always suppresses the power emission spectrum, indicating that such black holes live longer when the string parameter $a$ is increased while other parameters are fixed.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2023

Apiary: A DBMS-Integrated Transactional Function-as-a-Service Framework

Developers increasingly use function-as-a-service (FaaS) platforms for data-centric applications that perform low-latency and transactional operations on data, such as for microservices or web serving. Unfortunately, existing FaaS platforms support these applications poorly because they physically and logically separate application logic, executed in cloud functions, from data management, done in interactive transactions accessing remote storage. Physical separation harms performance while logical separation complicates efficiently providing transactional guarantees and fault tolerance. This paper introduces Apiary, a novel DBMS-integrated FaaS platform for deploying and composing fault-tolerant transactional functions. Apiary physically co-locates and logically integrates function execution and data management by wrapping a distributed DBMS engine and using it as a unified runtime for function execution, data management, and operational logging, thus providing similar or stronger transactional guarantees as comparable systems while greatly improving performance and observability. To allow developers to write complex stateful programs, we leverage this integration to enable efficient and fault-tolerant function composition, building a frontend for orchestrating workflows of functions with the guarantees that each workflow runs to completion and each function in a workflow executes exactly once. We evaluate Apiary against research and production FaaS platforms and show it outperforms them by 2--68x on microservice workloads by reducing communication overhead.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2023

Dual-Gated Fusion with Prefix-Tuning for Multi-Modal Relation Extraction

Multi-Modal Relation Extraction (MMRE) aims at identifying the relation between two entities in texts that contain visual clues. Rich visual content is valuable for the MMRE task, but existing works cannot well model finer associations among different modalities, failing to capture the truly helpful visual information and thus limiting relation extraction performance. In this paper, we propose a novel MMRE framework to better capture the deeper correlations of text, entity pair, and image/objects, so as to mine more helpful information for the task, termed as DGF-PT. We first propose a prompt-based autoregressive encoder, which builds the associations of intra-modal and inter-modal features related to the task, respectively by entity-oriented and object-oriented prefixes. To better integrate helpful visual information, we design a dual-gated fusion module to distinguish the importance of image/objects and further enrich text representations. In addition, a generative decoder is introduced with entity type restriction on relations, better filtering out candidates. Extensive experiments conducted on the benchmark dataset show that our approach achieves excellent performance compared to strong competitors, even in the few-shot situation.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2023

Option pricing under jump diffusion model

We provide an European option pricing formula written in the form of an infinite series of Black Scholes type terms under double Levy jumps model, where both the interest rate and underlying price are driven by Levy process. The series solution converges with a radius of convergence, and it is complemented by some numerical experiments to demonstrate its speed of convergence.

q-fin.PR↗
arXiv2023

Generating Counterfactual Hard Negative Samples for Graph Contrastive Learning

Graph contrastive learning has emerged as a powerful tool for unsupervised graph representation learning. The key to the success of graph contrastive learning is to acquire high-quality positive and negative samples as contrasting pairs for the purpose of learning underlying structural semantics of the input graph. Recent works usually sample negative samples from the same training batch with the positive samples, or from an external irrelevant graph. However, a significant limitation lies in such strategies, which is the unavoidable problem of sampling false negative samples. In this paper, we propose a novel method to utilize \textbf{C}ounterfactual mechanism to generate artificial hard negative samples for \textbf{G}raph \textbf{C}ontrastive learning, namely \textbf{CGC}, which has a different perspective compared to those sampling-based strategies. We utilize counterfactual mechanism to produce hard negative samples, which ensures that the generated samples are similar to, but have labels that different from the positive sample. The proposed method achieves satisfying results on several datasets compared to some traditional unsupervised graph learning methods and some SOTA graph contrastive learning methods. We also conduct some supplementary experiments to give an extensive illustration of the proposed method, including the performances of CGC with different hard negative samples and evaluations for hard negative samples generated with different similarity measurements.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Rotating Bardeen black hole surrounded by perfect fluid dark matter as a particle accelerator

We study the event horizon of a rotating Bardeen black hole surrounded by perfect fluid dark matter and the black hole as a particle accelerator. The black hole is represented by four parameters: mass $M$, rotation parameter $a$, dark matter parameter $α$ and magnetic charge $g$. It is interesting that when we determine the values of magnetic charge $g$ and dark matter parameters $α$ we can get a critical rotation parameter $a_E$ and then we get a contour plane with $Δ$= 0 taking three parameters as coordinates. We also derive the effective potential of the particle and the centre-of-mass (CM) energy of the two particles outside the black hole by using the motion equation of the particle in the equatorial plane of the black hole. We find that the CM energy depends not only on the rotation parameter $a$, but also on the parameters $g$ and $α$. We discuss the CM energy for two particles colliding at the black hole horizon in the extreme and non-extreme cases, respectively. It is found that the CM energy can be arbitrarily high when the angular momentum of one of the two particles is the critical angular momentum under the background of extreme black holes and there is no such result for non-extreme black holes, because the particles do not reach the black hole horizon when the angular momentum of the particles is critical angular momentum. Therefore, we prove that the rotating Bardeen black hole surrounded by perfect fluid dark matter can be used as a particle accelerator.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2023

A Comprehensive Survey on Pretrained Foundation Models: A History from BERT to ChatGPT

Pretrained Foundation Models (PFMs) are regarded as the foundation for various downstream tasks with different data modalities. A PFM (e.g., BERT, ChatGPT, and GPT-4) is trained on large-scale data which provides a reasonable parameter initialization for a wide range of downstream applications. BERT learns bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers, which are trained on large datasets as contextual language models. Similarly, the generative pretrained transformer (GPT) method employs Transformers as the feature extractor and is trained using an autoregressive paradigm on large datasets. Recently, ChatGPT shows promising success on large language models, which applies an autoregressive language model with zero shot or few shot prompting. The remarkable achievements of PFM have brought significant breakthroughs to various fields of AI. Numerous studies have proposed different methods, raising the demand for an updated survey. This study provides a comprehensive review of recent research advancements, challenges, and opportunities for PFMs in text, image, graph, as well as other data modalities. The review covers the basic components and existing pretraining methods used in natural language processing, computer vision, and graph learning. Additionally, it explores advanced PFMs used for different data modalities and unified PFMs that consider data quality and quantity. The review also discusses research related to the fundamentals of PFMs, such as model efficiency and compression, security, and privacy. Finally, the study provides key implications, future research directions, challenges, and open problems in the field of PFMs. Overall, this survey aims to shed light on the research of the PFMs on scalability, security, logical reasoning ability, cross-domain learning ability, and the user-friendly interactive ability for artificial general intelligence.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2023

Discrete Point-wise Attack Is Not Enough: Generalized Manifold Adversarial Attack for Face Recognition

Classical adversarial attacks for Face Recognition (FR) models typically generate discrete examples for target identity with a single state image. However, such paradigm of point-wise attack exhibits poor generalization against numerous unknown states of identity and can be easily defended. In this paper, by rethinking the inherent relationship between the face of target identity and its variants, we introduce a new pipeline of Generalized Manifold Adversarial Attack (GMAA) to achieve a better attack performance by expanding the attack range. Specifically, this expansion lies on two aspects - GMAA not only expands the target to be attacked from one to many to encourage a good generalization ability for the generated adversarial examples, but it also expands the latter from discrete points to manifold by leveraging the domain knowledge that face expression change can be continuous, which enhances the attack effect as a data augmentation mechanism did. Moreover, we further design a dual supervision with local and global constraints as a minor contribution to improve the visual quality of the generated adversarial examples. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method based on extensive experiments, and reveal that GMAA promises a semantic continuous adversarial space with a higher generalization ability and visual quality

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Attribute-Consistent Knowledge Graph Representation Learning for Multi-Modal Entity Alignment

The multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA) aims to find all equivalent entity pairs between multi-modal knowledge graphs (MMKGs). Rich attributes and neighboring entities are valuable for the alignment task, but existing works ignore contextual gap problems that the aligned entities have different numbers of attributes on specific modality when learning entity representations. In this paper, we propose a novel attribute-consistent knowledge graph representation learning framework for MMEA (ACK-MMEA) to compensate the contextual gaps through incorporating consistent alignment knowledge. Attribute-consistent KGs (ACKGs) are first constructed via multi-modal attribute uniformization with merge and generate operators so that each entity has one and only one uniform feature in each modality. The ACKGs are then fed into a relation-aware graph neural network with random dropouts, to obtain aggregated relation representations and robust entity representations. In order to evaluate the ACK-MMEA facilitated for entity alignment, we specially design a joint alignment loss for both entity and attribute evaluation. Extensive experiments conducted on two benchmark datasets show that our approach achieves excellent performance compared to its competitors.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2023

Supercontinuum generation in dispersion engineered highly doped silica glass waveguides

We investigate the effect of a lower index oxide layer inclusion within a highly doped silica glass slot waveguide for optimized supercontinuum generation at telecom wavelengths. By controlling the thickness of the oxide slot, we demonstrate that one can engineer the waveguide dispersion profile so that to obtain supercontinua with vastly different spectral broadening dynamics and bandwidths. Using this approach, we designed and fabricated a waveguide with a low and flat dispersion profile of less than 43 ps/km/nm across a wavelength range spanning over 1000 nm. We show that, when pumped at the telecom C-band, we can generate a supercontinuum that spans over 1.5 octave, from approximately 817 nm to 2183 nm. The numerical simulations, whose parameters are derived from the measured waveguide dimension and material indices, exhibit good agreement with experimental measurements, where one can observe both a qualitative and quantitative match in the supercontinuum overall spectrum and specific features (e.g. soliton and dispersive wave locations). This study represents an important step forward in the control and manipulation of dispersive and nonlinear dynamics in highly doped silica glass waveguides, paving the way towards advanced on-chip broadband light manipulation.

physics.optics↗
arXiv2023

Causality-based Counterfactual Explanation for Classification Models

Counterfactual explanation is one branch of interpretable machine learning that produces a perturbation sample to change the model's original decision. The generated samples can act as a recommendation for end-users to achieve their desired outputs. Most of the current counterfactual explanation approaches are the gradient-based method, which can only optimize the differentiable loss functions with continuous variables. Accordingly, the gradient-free methods are proposed to handle the categorical variables, which however have several major limitations: 1) causal relationships among features are typically ignored when generating the counterfactuals, possibly resulting in impractical guidelines for decision-makers; 2) the counterfactual explanation algorithm requires a great deal of effort into parameter tuning for dertermining the optimal weight for each loss functions which must be conducted repeatedly for different datasets and settings. In this work, to address the above limitations, we propose a prototype-based counterfactual explanation framework (ProCE). ProCE is capable of preserving the causal relationship underlying the features of the counterfactual data. In addition, we design a novel gradient-free optimization based on the multi-objective genetic algorithm that generates the counterfactual explanations for the mixed-type of continuous and categorical features. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our method compares favorably with state-of-the-art methods and therefore is applicable to existing prediction models. All the source codes and data are available at \url{https://github.com/tridungduong16/multiobj-scm-cf}.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Achieving Counterfactual Fairness with Imperfect Structural Causal Model

Counterfactual fairness alleviates the discrimination between the model prediction toward an individual in the actual world (observational data) and that in counterfactual world (i.e., what if the individual belongs to other sensitive groups). The existing studies need to pre-define the structural causal model that captures the correlations among variables for counterfactual inference; however, the underlying causal model is usually unknown and difficult to be validated in real-world scenarios. Moreover, the misspecification of the causal model potentially leads to poor performance in model prediction and thus makes unfair decisions. In this research, we propose a novel minimax game-theoretic model for counterfactual fairness that can produce accurate results meanwhile achieve a counterfactually fair decision with the relaxation of strong assumptions of structural causal models. In addition, we also theoretically prove the error bound of the proposed minimax model. Empirical experiments on multiple real-world datasets illustrate our superior performance in both accuracy and fairness. Source code is available at \url{https://github.com/tridungduong16/counterfactual_fairness_game_theoretic}.

cs.LG↗