Data Science and System Security

Read our publications from our Data Science & System Security researchers who aim to build novel big-data solutions and service platforms to simplify complex systems management. We develop new information technology that supports innovative applications, from big data analytics to the Internet of Things. Our experimental and theoretical research includes many data science and systems research domains including time series mining, deep learning, NLP and large language models, graph mining, signal processing, and cloud computing.

Posts

Improving Open Information Extraction with Large Language Models: A Study on Demonstration Uncertainty

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Open Information Extraction (OIE) task aims at extracting structured facts from unstructured text, typically in the form of (subject, relation, object) triples. Despite the potential of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT as a general task solver, they lag behind state-of-the-art (supervised) methods in OIE tasks due to two key issues. First, LLMs struggle to distinguish irrelevant context from relevant relations and generate structured output due to the restrictions on fine-tuning the model. Second, LLMs generate responses autoregressively based on probability, which makes the predicted relations lack confidence. In this paper, we assess the capabilities of LLMs in improving the OIE task. Particularly, we propose various in-context learning strategies to enhance LLM’s instruction-following ability and a demonstration uncertainty quantification module to enhance the confidence of the generated relations. Our experiments on three OIE benchmark datasets show that our approach holds its own against established supervised methods, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

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Parametric Augmentation for Time Series Contrastive Learning

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Modern techniques like contrastive learning have been effectively used in many areas, including computer vision, natural language processing, and graph-structured data. Creating positive examples that assist the model in learning robust and discriminative representations is a crucial stage in contrastive learning approaches. Usually, preset human intuition directs the selection of relevant data augmentations. Due to patterns that are easily recognized by humans, this rule of thumb works well in the vision and language domains. However, it is impractical to visually inspect the temporal structures in time series. The diversity of time series augmentations at both the dataset and instance levels makes it difficult to choose meaningful augmentations on the fly. In this study, we address this gap by analyzing time series data augmentation using information theory and summarizing the most commonly adopted augmentations in a unified format. We then propose a contrastive learning framework with parametric augmentation, AutoTCL, which can be adaptively employed to support time series representation learning. The proposed approach is encoder-agnostic, allowing it to be seamlessly integrated with different backbone encoders. Experiments on univariate forecasting tasks demonstrate the highly competitive results of our method, with an average 6.5% reduction in MSE and 4.7% in MAE over the leading baselines. In classification tasks, AutoTCL achieves a 1.2% increase in average accuracy. The source code is available at https://github.com/AslanDing/AutoTCL.

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Towards Robust Fidelity for Evaluating Explainability of Graph Neural Networks

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Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are neural models that leverage the dependency structure in graphical data via message passing among the graph nodes. GNNs have emerged as pivotal architectures in analyzing graph-structured data, and their expansive application in sensitive domains requires a comprehensive understanding of their decision-making processes — necessitating a framework for GNN explainability. An explanation function for GNNs takes a pre-trained GNN along with a graph as input, to produce a ‘sufficient statistic’ subgraph with respect to the graph label. A main challenge in studying GNN explainability is to provide f idelity measures that evaluate the performance of these explanation functions. This paper studies this foundational challenge, spotlighting the inherent limitations of prevailing fidelity metrics, including Fid+, Fid?, and Fid?. Specifically, a formal, information-theoretic definition of explainability is introduced and it is shown that existing metrics often fail to align with this definition across various statistical scenarios. The reason is due to potential distribution shifts when subgraphs are removed in computing these fidelity measures. Subsequently, a robust class of fidelity measures are introduced, and it is shown analytically that they are resilient to distribution shift issues and are applicable in a wide range of scenarios. Extensive empirical analysis on both synthetic and real datasets are provided to illustrate that the proposed metrics are more coherent with gold standard metrics. The source code is available at https://trustai4s-lab.github.io/fidelity.

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Dynamic Causal Discovery in Imitation Learning

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Imitation learning, which learns agent policy by mimicking expert demonstration, has shown promising results in many applications such as medical treatment regimes and self-driving vehicles. However, it remains a difficult task to interpret control policies learned by the agent. Difficulties mainly come from two aspects: 1) agents in imitation learning are usually implemented as deep neural networks, which are black-box models and lack interpretability; 2) the latent causal mechanism behind agents’ decisions may vary along the trajectory, rather than staying static throughout time steps. To increase transparency and offer better interpretability of the neural agent, we propose to expose its captured knowledge in the form of a directed acyclic causal graph, with nodes being action and state variables and edges denoting the causal relations behind predictions. Furthermore, we design this causal discovery process to be state-dependent, enabling it to model the dynamics in latent causal graphs. Concretely, we conduct causal discovery from the perspective of Granger causality and propose a self-explainable imitation learning framework, CAIL. The proposed framework is composed of three parts: a dynamic causal discovery module, a causality encoding module, and a prediction module, and is trained in an end-to-end manner. After the model is learned, we can obtain causal relations among states and action variables behind its decisions, exposing policies learned by it. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CAIL in learning the dynamic causal graphs for understanding the decision-making of imitation learning meanwhilemaintaining high prediction accuracy.

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Prompt-based Domain Discrimination for Multi-source Time Series Domain Adaptation

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Time series domain adaptation stands as a pivotal and intricate challenge with diverse applications, including but not limited to human activity recognition, sleep stage classification, and machine fault diagnosis. Despite the numerous domain adaptation techniques proposed to tackle this complex problem, their primary focus has been on the common representations of time series data. This concentration might inadvertently lead to the oversight of valuable domain-specific information originating from different source domains. To bridge this gap, we introduce POND, a novel prompt-based deep learning model designed explicitly for multi-source time series domain adaptation. POND is tailored to address significant challenges, notably: 1) The unavailability of a quantitative relationship between meta-data information and time series distributions, and 2) The dearth of exploration into extracting domain specific meta-data information. In this paper, we present an instance-level prompt generator and afidelity loss mechanism to facilitate the faithful learning of meta-data information. Additionally, we propose a domain discrimination technique to discern domain-specific meta-data information from multiple source domains. Our approach involves a simple yet effective meta-learning algorithm to optimize the objective efficiently. Furthermore, we augment the model’s performance by incorporating the Mixture of Expert (MoE) technique. The efficacy and robustness of our proposed POND model are extensively validated through experiments across 50 scenarios encompassing five datasets, which demonstrates that our proposed POND model outperforms the state-of the-art methods by up to 66% on the F1-score.

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Hierarchical Gaussian Mixture based Task Generative Model for Robust Meta-Learning

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Meta-learning enables quick adaptation of machine learning models to new tasks with limited data. While tasks could come from varying distributions in reality, most of the existing meta-learning methods consider both training and testing tasks as from the same uni-component distribution, overlooking two critical needs of a practical solution: (1) the various sources of tasks may compose a multi-component mixture distribution, and (2) novel tasks may come from a distribution that is unseen during meta-training. In this paper, we demonstrate these two challenges can be solved jointly by modeling the density of task instances. We develop a meta training framework underlain by a novel Hierarchical Gaussian Mixture based Task Generative Model (HTGM). HTGM extends the widely used empirical process of sampling tasks to a theoretical model, which learns task embeddings, fits the mixture distribution of tasks, and enables density-based scoring of novel tasks. The framework is agnostic to the encoder and scales well with large backbone networks. The model parameters are learned end-to-end by maximum likelihood estimation via an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets indicate the effectiveness of our method for both sample classification and novel task detection.

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Open-Ended Commonsense Reasoning with Unrestricted Answer Scope

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Open-ended Commonsense Reasoning is defined as solving a commonsense question without providing 1) a short list of answer candidates and 2) a pre-defined answer scope. Conventional ways of formulating the commonsense question into a question-answering form or utilizing external knowledge to learn retrieval-based methods are less applicable in the open-ended setting due to an inherent challenge. Without pre-defining an answer scope or a few candidates, open-ended commonsense reasoning entails predicting answers by searching over an extremely large searching space. Moreover, most questions require implicit multi-hop reasoning, which presents even more challenges to our problem. In this work, we leverage pre-trained language models to iteratively retrieve reasoning paths on the external knowledge base, which does not require task-specific supervision. The reasoning paths can help to identify the most precise answer to the commonsense question. We conduct experiments on two commonsense benchmark datasets. Compared to other approaches, our proposed method achieves better performance both quantitatively and qualitatively.

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GLAD: Content-Aware Dynamic Graphs for Log Anomaly Detection

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Logs play a crucial role in system monitoring and debugging by recording valuable system information, including events and status. Although various methods have been proposed to detect anomalies in log sequences, they often overlook the significance of considering relationships among system components, such as services and users, which can be identified from log contents. Understanding these relationships is vital for identifying anomalies and their underlying causes. To address this issue, we introduce GLAD, a Graph-based Log Anomaly Detection framework designed to detect relational anomalies in system logs. GLAD incorporates log semantics, relationship patterns, and sequential patterns into a unified framework for anomaly detection. Specifically, GLAD first introduces a field extraction module that utilizes prompt-based few-shot learning to extract essential field information, such as services and users, from log contents. Then GLAD constructs dynamic log graphs for sliding windows by leveraging the log events and extracted fields. These graphs represent events and fields as nodes and their relationships as edges. Subsequently, we propose atemporal-attentive graph edge anomaly detection model for identifying anomalous relationships in the dynamic log graphs. This model employs a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based encoder enhanced with transformers to capture structural, content, and temporal features. We evaluate our proposed method on three datasets, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of GLAD in detecting anomalies indicated by varying relation patterns.

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Adaptation Speed Analysis for Fairness-Aware Causal Models

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For example, in machine translation tasks, to achieve bidirectional translation between two languages, the source corpus is often used as the target corpus, which involves the training of two models with opposite directions. The question of which one can adapt most quickly to a domain shift is of significant importance in many fields. Specifically, consider an original distribution p that changes due to an unknown intervention, resulting in a modified distribution p*. In aligning p with p*, several factors can affect the adaptation rate, including the causal dependencies between variables in p. In real-life scenarios, however, we have to consider the fairness of the training process, and it is particularly crucial to involve a sensitive variable (bias) present between a cause and an effect variable. To explore this scenario, we examine a simple structural causal model (SCM) with a cause-bias-effect structure, where variable A acts as a sensitive variable between cause (X) and effect (Y). The two models respectively exhibit consistent and contrary cause-effect directions in the cause-bias-effect SCM. After conducting unknown interventions on variables within the SCM, we can simulate some kinds of domain shifts for analysis. We then compare the adaptation speeds of two models across four shift scenarios. Additionally, we prove the connection between the adaptation speeds of the two models across all interventions.

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Calibrate Graph Neural Networks under Out-of-Distribution Nodes via Deep Q-learning

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Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in dealing with graph-structured data that are prevalent in the real world. The core of graph neural networks is the message passing mechanism that aims to generate the embeddings of nodes by aggregating the neighboring node information. However, recent work suggests that GNNs also suffer the trustworthiness issues. Our empirical study shows that the calibration error of the in-distribution (ID) nodes would be exacerbated if a graph is mixed with out-of-distribution (OOD) nodes, and we assume that the noisy information from OOD nodes is the root for the worsened calibration error. Both previous study and our empirical study suggest that adjusting the weights of edges could be a promising way to reduce the adverse impact from the OOD nodes. However, how to precisely select the desired edges and modify the corresponding weights is not trivial, since the distribution of OOD nodes is unknown to us. To tackle this problem, we propose a Graph Edge Re-weighting via Deep Q-learning (GERDQ) framework to calibrate the graph neural networks. Our framework aims to explore the potential influence of the change of the edge weights on target ID nodes by sampling and traversing the edges in the graph, and we formulate this process as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Many existing GNNs could be seamlessly incorporated into our framework. Experimental results show that when wrapped with our method, the existing GNN models can yield lower calibration error under OOD nodes as well as comparable accuracy compared to the original ones and other strong baselines. The source code is available at:https://github.com/DamoSWL/Calibration-GNN-OOD.

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