Canada

This paper reveals a data bias issue that can profoundly hinder the performance of machine learning models in malicious URL detection. We describe how such bias can be diagnosed using interpretable machine learning techniques and further argue that such biases naturally exist in the real world security data for training a classification model. To counteract these challenges, we propose a debiased training strategy that can be applied to most deep-learning based models to alleviate the negative effects of the biased features. The solution is based on the technique of adversarial training to train deep neural networks learning invariant embedding from biased data. Through extensive experimentation, we substantiate that our innovative strategy fosters superior generalization capabilities across both CNN-based and RNN-based detection models. The findings presented in this work not only expose a latent issue in the field but also provide an actionable remedy, marking a significant step forward in the pursuit of more reliable and robust malicious URL detection.

AAAI 2024

Toward More Generalized Malicious URL Detection Models

malware detection

debiasing

self-supervised

robustness

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

Adversarial attacks, \ie generating adversarial perturbations with a small magnitude to deceive deep neural networks, are important for investigating and improving model trustworthiness. Traditionally, the topic was scoped within 2D images without considering 3D multiview information. Benefiting from Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), one can easily reconstruct a 3D scene with a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) from given 2D views and synthesize photo-realistic renderings of novel vantages. This opens up a door to discussing the possibility of undertaking to attack multiview NeRF network with downstream tasks from different rendering angles, which we denote Neural Radiance Fiels-based multiview adversarial Attack (NeRFail). The goal is, given one scene and a subset of views, to deceive the recognition results of agnostic view angles as well as given views. To do so, we propose a transformation mapping from pixels to 3D points such that our attack generates multiview adversarial perturbations by attacking a subset of images with different views, intending to prevent the downstream classifier from correctly predicting images rendered by NeRF from other views. Experiments show that our multiview adversarial perturbations successfully obfuscate the downstream classifier at both known and unknown views. Notably, when retraining another NeRF on the perturbed training data, we show that the perturbation can be inherited and reproduced. The code can be found at https://github.com/jiang-wenxiang/NeRFail.

NeRFail: Neural Radiance Fields-Based Multiview Adversarial Attack

Recent research has introduced several approaches to formally verify the robustness of neural network models against perturbations in their inputs, such as the ones that occur in adversarial attacks. At the same time, this particular verification task is known to be computationally challenging. More specifically, assessing the robustness of a neural network against input perturbations can easily take several hours of compute time per input vector, even when using state-of-the-art verification approaches. In light of this, it becomes challenging to select from a given set of neural network models the one that is best in terms of robust accuracy, i.e., the fraction of instances for which the model is known to be robust against adversarial perturbations, especially when given limited computing resources.
To tackle this problem, we propose a racing method specifically adapted to the domain of robustness verification. This racing method utilises Delta-values, which can be seen as an efficiently computable proxy for the distance of a given input to a neural network model to the decision boundary. We present statistical evidence indicating significant differences in the empirical cumulative distribution between robust and non-robust inputs as a function of Delta-values. Using this information, we show that it is possible to reliably expose vulnerabilities in the model with relatively few input iterations. Overall, when applied to selecting the most robust network from sets of 31 MNIST and 27 CIFAR-10 networks, our proposed method achieves speedups of a factor of 108 and 42, respectively, in terms of cumulative running time compared to standard local robustness verification on the complete testing sets.

Accelerating Adversarially Robust Model Selection for Deep Neural Networks via Racing

Decision trees are widely used for addressing learning tasks involving tabular data. Yet, they are susceptible to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we present Tree Test Time Simulation (TTTS), a novel inference-time methodology that incorporates Monte Carlo simulations into decision trees to enhance their robustness. TTTS introduces a probabilistic modification to the decision path, without altering the underlying tree structure. Our comprehensive empirical analysis of 50 datasets yields promising results. Without the presence of any attacks, TTTS has successfully improved model performance from an AUC of 0.714 to 0.773. Under the challenging conditions of white-box attacks, TTTS demonstrated its robustness by boosting performance from an AUC of 0.337 to 0.680. Even when subjected to black-box attacks, TTTS maintains high accuracy and enhances the model's performance from an AUC of 0.628 to 0.719. Compared to defenses such as Feature Squeezing, TTTS proves to be much more effective. We also found that TTTS exhibits similar robustness in decision forest settings across different attacks.

TTTS: Tree Test Time Simulation for Enhancing Decision Tree Robustness against Adversarial Examples

Conformal prediction is a statistical tool for producing prediction regions of machine learning models that are valid with high probability. However, applying conformal prediction to  time series data leads to  conservative prediction regions. In fact,  to obtain prediction regions over $T$ time steps with confidence $1-\delta$, {previous works require that each individual prediction region is valid} with confidence $1-\delta/T$. We propose an optimization-based method for  reducing this conservatism to enable long horizon planning and verification when using learning-enabled time series predictors. Instead of considering prediction errors individually at each time step, we consider a parameterized prediction error over multiple time steps. By optimizing the parameters over an additional dataset, we find  prediction regions that are not conservative. We show that this problem can be cast as a mixed integer linear complementarity program (MILCP), which we then relax into a linear complementarity program (LCP). Additionally, we prove that the relaxed LP has the same optimal cost as the original MILCP. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our method on case studies using pedestrian trajectory predictors and F16 fighter jet altitude predictors.

Conformal Prediction Regions for Time Series Using Linear Complementarity Programming

Multi-label classification poses challenges due to imbalanced and noisy labels in training data. In this paper, we propose a unified data augmentation method, named BalanceMix, to address these challenges. Our approach includes two samplers for imbalanced labels, generating minority-augmented instances with high diversity. It also refines multi-labels at the label-wise granularity, categorizing noisy labels as clean, re-labeled, or ambiguous for robust optimization. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that BalanceMix outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. We release the code at https://github.com/DISL-Lab/BalanceMix.

Toward Robustness in Multi-Label Classification: A Data Augmentation Strategy against Imbalance and Noise | VIDEO

To trace the copyright of deep neural networks, an owner can embed its identity information into its model as a watermark.
The capacity of the watermark quantify the maximal volume of information that can be verified from the watermarked model.
Current studies on capacity focus on the ownership verification accuracy under ordinary removal attacks and fail to capture the relationship between robustness and fidelity.
This paper studies the capacity of deep neural network watermarks from an information theoretical perspective.
We propose a new definition of deep neural network watermark capacity analogous to channel capacity, analyze its properties, and design an algorithm that yields a tight estimation of its upper bound under adversarial overwriting.
We also propose a universal non-invasive method to secure the transmission of the identity message beyond capacity by multiple rounds of ownership verification. 
Our observations provide evidence for neural network owners and defenders that are curious about the tradeoff between the integrity of their ownership and the performance degradation of their products.

Revisiting the Information Capacity of Neural Network Watermarks: Upper Bound Estimation and Beyond

As algorithmic decision-making systems become more prevalent in society, ensuring the fairness of these systems is becoming increasingly important. Whilst there has been substantial research in building fair algorithmic decision-making systems, the majority of these methods require access to the training data, including personal characteristics, and are not transparent regarding which individuals are classified unfairly. In this paper, we propose a novel model-agnostic argumentation-based method to determine why an individual is classified differently in comparison to similar individuals. Our method uses a quantitative argumentation framework to represent attribute-value pairs of an individual and of those similar to them, and uses a well-known semantics to identify the attribute-value pairs in the individual contributing most to their different classification. We evaluate our method on two datasets commonly used in the fairness literature and illustrate its effectiveness in the identification of bias.

Identifying Reasons for Bias: An Argumentation-Based Approach

Decision trees are among the most popular supervised models due to their interpretability and knowledge representation resembling human reasoning. Commonly-used decision tree induction algorithms are based on greedy top-down strategies. Although these approaches are known to be an efficient heuristic, the resulting trees are only locally optimal and tend to have overly complex structures. On the other hand, optimal decision tree algorithms attempt to create an entire decision tree at once to achieve global optimality. We place our proposal between these approaches by designing a generative model for decision trees. Our method first learns a latent decision tree space through a variational architecture using pre-trained decision tree models. Then, it adopts a genetic procedure to explore such latent space to find a compact decision tree with good predictive performance. We compare our proposal against classical tree induction methods, optimal approaches, and ensemble models. The results show that our proposal can generate accurate and shallow, i.e., interpretable, decision trees.

Generative Model for Decision Trees | VIDEO

Prototypical parts-based networks are becoming increasingly popular due to their faithful self-explanations. However, their similarity maps are calculated in the penultimate network layer. Therefore, the receptive field of the prototype activation region often depends on parts of the image outside this region, which can lead to misleading interpretations. We name this undesired behavior a spatial explanation misalignment and introduce an interpretability benchmark with a set of dedicated metrics for quantifying this phenomenon. In addition, we propose a method for misalignment compensation and apply it to existing state-of-the-art models. We show the expressiveness of our benchmark and the effectiveness of the proposed compensation methodology through extensive empirical studies.

Interpretability Benchmark for Evaluating Spatial Misalignment of Prototypical Parts Explanations

Avoiding synthesizing specific visual concepts is an essential challenge in responsible visual synthesis. However, the visual concept that needs to be avoided for responsible visual synthesis tends to be diverse, depending on the region, context, and usage scenarios. In this work, we formalize a new task, Open-vocabulary Responsible Visual Synthesis (ORES), where the synthesis model is able to avoid forbidden visual concepts while allowing users to input any desired content. To address this problem, we present a Two-stage Intervention (TIN) framework. By introducing 1) rewriting with learnable instruction through a large-scale language model (LLM) and 2) synthesizing with prompt intervention on a diffusion synthesis model, it can effectively synthesize images avoiding any concepts but following the user's query as much as possible. To evaluate on ORES, we provide a publicly available dataset, baseline models, and benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in reducing risks of image generation. Our work highlights the potential of LLMs in responsible visual synthesis. Our code and dataset is public available in https://github.com/kodenii/ORES.

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