Xiang Chen

Xiang Ling, Lingfei Wu, Jiangyu Zhang et al.

Malware has been one of the most damaging threats to computers that span across multiple operating systems and various file formats. To defend against ever-increasing and ever-evolving malware, tremendous efforts have been made to propose a variety of malware detection that attempt to effectively and efficiently detect malware so as to mitigate possible damages as early as possible. Recent studies have shown that, on the one hand, existing ML and DL techniques enable superior solutions in detecting newly emerging and previously unseen malware. However, on the other hand, ML and DL models are inherently vulnerable to adversarial attacks in the form of adversarial examples. In this paper, we focus on malware with the file format of portable executable (PE) in the family of Windows operating systems, namely Windows PE malware, as a representative case to study the adversarial attack methods in such adversarial settings. To be specific, we start by first outlining the general learning framework of Windows PE malware detection based on ML/DL and subsequently highlighting three unique challenges of performing adversarial attacks in the context of Windows PE malware. Then, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic review to categorize the state-of-the-art adversarial attacks against PE malware detection, as well as corresponding defenses to increase the robustness of Windows PE malware detection. Finally, we conclude the paper by first presenting other related attacks against Windows PE malware detection beyond the adversarial attacks and then shedding light on future research directions and opportunities. In addition, a curated resource list of adversarial attacks and defenses for Windows PE malware detection is also available at https://github.com/ryderling/adversarial-attacks-and-defenses-for-windows-pe-malware-detection.

Jiaxing Zhao, Boyuan Sun, Xiang Chen et al.

Facial expression captioning has found widespread application across various domains. Recently, the emergence of video Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has shown promise in general video understanding tasks. However, describing facial expressions within videos poses two major challenges for these models: (1) the lack of adequate datasets and benchmarks, and (2) the limited visual token capacity of video MLLMs. To address these issues, this paper introduces a new instruction-following dataset tailored for dynamic facial expression caption. The dataset comprises 5,033 high-quality video clips annotated manually, containing over 700,000 tokens. Its purpose is to improve the capability of video MLLMs to discern subtle facial nuances. Furthermore, we propose FaceTrack-MM, which leverages a limited number of tokens to encode the main character's face. This model demonstrates superior performance in tracking faces and focusing on the facial expressions of the main characters, even in intricate multi-person scenarios. Additionally, we introduce a novel evaluation metric combining event extraction, relation classification, and the longest common subsequence (LCS) algorithm to assess the content consistency and temporal sequence consistency of generated text. Moreover, we present FEC-Bench, a benchmark designed to assess the performance of existing video MLLMs in this specific task. All data and source code will be made publicly available.

Md Mehrab Tanjim, Xiang Chen, Victor S. Bursztyn et al.

Multi-turn conversations with an Enterprise AI Assistant can be challenging due to conversational dependencies in questions, leading to ambiguities and errors. To address this, we propose an NLU-NLG framework for ambiguity detection and resolution through reformulating query automatically and introduce a new task called "Ambiguity-guided Query Rewrite." To detect ambiguities, we develop a taxonomy based on real user conversational logs and draw insights from it to design rules and extract features for a classifier which yields superior performance in detecting ambiguous queries, outperforming LLM-based baselines. Furthermore, coupling the query rewrite module with our ambiguity detecting classifier shows that this end-to-end framework can effectively mitigate ambiguities without risking unnecessary insertions of unwanted phrases for clear queries, leading to an improvement in the overall performance of the AI Assistant. Due to its significance, this has been deployed in the real world application, namely Adobe Experience Platform AI Assistant.

Reuben Luera, Ryan Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt et al.

In this work, we research user preferences to see a chart, table, or text given a question asked by the user. This enables us to understand when it is best to show a chart, table, or text to the user for the specific question. For this, we conduct a user study where users are shown a question and asked what they would prefer to see and used the data to establish that a user's personal traits does influence the data outputs that they prefer. Understanding how user characteristics impact a user's preferences is critical to creating data tools with a better user experience. Additionally, we investigate to what degree an LLM can be used to replicate a user's preference with and without user preference data. Overall, these findings have significant implications pertaining to the development of data tools and the replication of human preferences using LLMs. Furthermore, this work demonstrates the potential use of LLMs to replicate user preference data which has major implications for future user modeling and personalization research.

Xiang Chen, Shuying Gan, Chenyuan Feng et al.

The growing demand for efficient semantic communication systems capable of managing diverse tasks and adapting to fluctuating channel conditions has driven the development of robust, resource-efficient frameworks. This article introduces a novel channel-adaptive and multi-task-aware semantic communication framework based on a masked auto-encoder architecture. Our framework optimizes the transmission of meaningful information by incorporating a multi-task-aware scoring mechanism that identifies and prioritizes semantically significant data across multiple concurrent tasks. A channel-aware extractor is employed to dynamically select relevant information in response to real-time channel conditions. By jointly optimizing semantic relevance and transmission efficiency, the framework ensures minimal performance degradation under resource constraints. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our framework compared to conventional methods in tasks such as image reconstruction and object detection. These results underscore the framework's adaptability to heterogeneous channel environments and its scalability for multi-task applications, positioning it as a promising solution for next-generation semantic communication networks.

Shangqing Liu, Yanchao Zhao, Fanggang Xue et al.

Recently, the research of wireless sensing has achieved more intelligent results, and the intelligent sensing of human location and activity can be realized by means of WiFi devices. However, most of the current human environment perception work is limited to a single person's environment, because the environment in which multiple people exist is more complicated than the environment in which a single person exists. In order to solve the problem of human behavior perception in a multi-human environment, we first proposed a solution to achieve crowd counting (inferred population) using deep learning in a closed environment with WIFI signals - DeepCout, which is the first in a multi-human environment. step. Since the use of WiFi to directly count the crowd is too complicated, we use deep learning to solve this problem, use Convolutional Neural Network(CNN) to automatically extract the relationship between the number of people and the channel, and use Long Short Term Memory(LSTM) to resolve the dependencies of number of people and Channel State Information(CSI) . To overcome the massive labelled data required by deep learning method, we add an online learning mechanism to determine whether or not someone is entering/leaving the room by activity recognition model, so as to correct the deep learning model in the fine-tune stage, which, in turn, reduces the required training data and make our method evolving over time. The system of DeepCount is performed and evaluated on the commercial WiFi devices. By massive training samples, our end-to-end learning approach can achieve an average of 86.4% prediction accuracy in an environment of up to 5 people. Meanwhile, by the amendment mechanism of the activity recognition model to judge door switch to get the variance of crowd to amend deep learning predicted results, the accuracy is up to 90%.

Fuxun Yu, Zhuwei Qin, Xiang Chen

Neural network compression and acceleration are widely demanded currently due to the resource constraints on most deployment targets. In this paper, through analyzing the filter activation, gradients, and visualizing the filters' functionality in convolutional neural networks, we show that the filters in higher layers learn extremely task-specific features, which are exclusive for only a small subset of the overall tasks, or even a single class. Based on such findings, we reveal the critical paths of information flow for different classes. And by their intrinsic property of exclusiveness, we propose a critical path distillation method, which can effectively customize the convolutional neural networks to small ones with much smaller model size and less computation.