In the realm of role-playing games (RPGs), creating immersive, persona-driven dialogues remains a challenge, especially in intricate settings, such asCall of Cthulhu. Existing methodologies often falter in portraying character personas within complex conversations accurately. To address this, we introduce a novel card-based framework, utilizing the advanced 7B language model for tailored dialogue generation. Guided by detailed scene settings and character personas, 7B language model exhibited a striking ability to craft context-aware dialogues for even unseen characters and scenarios. To assess the quality of these dialogues, we present an innovative metric, circumventing the traditional hurdles of human evaluations. Furthermore, insights into the attention mechanism shed light on the dynamics of information flow during dialogue creation. Collectively, our findings underscore the transformative potential of large language models in computational storytelling, particularly in RPG settings.

Most examinations of neural networks' learned latent spaces typically employ dimensionality reduction techniques such as t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) or uniform manifold approximation and projection (UMAP). These methods distort the local neighborhood in the visualization, making it hard to distinguish the structure of a subset of samples in the latent space. In response to this challenge, we introduce the k* distribution and its corresponding visualization technique. This method uses local neighborhood analysis to guarantee the preservation of the structure of sample distributions for individual classes within the subset of the learned latent space. This facilitates easy comparison of different k* distributions, enabling analysis of how various classes are processed by the same neural network. Our study reveals three distinct distributions of samples within the learned latent space subset: 1) fractured; 2) overlapped; and 3) clustered, providing a more profound understanding of the existing contemporary visualizations. Experiments show that the distribution of samples within the network's learned latent space significantly varies depending on the class. Furthermore, we illustrate that our analysis can be applied to explore the latent space of diverse neural network architectures, various layers within neural networks, transformations applied to input samples, and the distribution of training and testing data for neural networks. Thus, the k* distribution should aid in visualizing the structure inside neural networks and further foster their understanding.

Vision Transformer (ViT) has demonstrated promising performance in computer vision tasks, comparable to state-of-the-art neural networks. Yet, this new type of deep neural network architecture is vulnerable to adversarial attacks limiting its capabilities in terms of robustness. This article presents a novel contribution aimed at further improving the accuracy and robustness of ViT, particularly in the face of adversarial attacks. We propose an augmentation technique called ‘Dynamic Scanning Augmentation’ that leverages dynamic input sequences to adaptively focus on different patches, thereby maintaining performance and robustness. Our detailed investigations reveal that this adaptability to the input sequence induces significant changes in the attention mechanism of ViT, even for the same image. We introduce four variations of Dynamic Scanning Augmentation, outperforming ViT in terms of both robustness to adversarial attacks and accuracy against natural images, with one variant showing comparable results. By integrating our augmentation technique, we observe a substantial increase in ViT’s robustness, improving it from 17% to 92% measured across different types of adversarial attacks. These findings, together with other comprehensive tests, indicate that Dynamic Scanning Augmentation enhances accuracy and robustness by promoting a more adaptive type of attention. In conclusion, this work contributes to the ongoing research on Vision Transformers by introducing Dynamic Scanning Augmentation as a technique for improving the accuracy and robustness of ViT. The observed results highlight the potential of this approach in advancing computer vision tasks and merit further exploration in future studies.

Humans possess an inherent ability to chunk sequences into their constituent parts. In fact, this ability is thought to bootstrap language skills and learning of image patterns which might be a key to a more animal-like type of intelligence. Here, we propose a continual generalization of the chunking problem (an unsupervised problem), encompassing fixed and probabilistic chunks, discovery of temporal and causal structures and their continual variations. Additionally, we propose an algorithm called SyncMap that can learn and adapt to changes in the problem by creating a dynamic map which preserves the correlation between variables. Results of SyncMap suggest that the proposed algorithm learn near optimal solutions, despite the presence of many types of structures and their continual variation. When compared to Word2vec, PARSER and MRIL, SyncMap surpasses or ties with the best algorithm on 66% of the scenarios while being the second best in the remaining 34%. SyncMap's model-free simple dynamics and the absence of loss functions reveal that, perhaps surprisingly, much can be done with self-organization alone.

Recently, deep learning based natural language processing techniques are being extensively used to deal with spam mail, censorship evaluation in social networks, among others. However, there is only a couple of works evaluating the vulnerabilities of such deep neural networks. Here, we go beyond attacks to investigate, for the first time, universal rules, i.e., rules that are sample agnostic and therefore could turn any text sample in an adversarial one. In fact, the universal rules do not use any information from the method itself (no information from the method, gradient information or training dataset information is used), making them black-box universal attacks. In other words, the universal rules are sample and method agnostic. By proposing a coevolutionary optimization algorithm we show that it is possible to create universal rules that can automatically craft imperceptible adversarial samples (only less than five perturbations which are close to misspelling are inserted in the text sample). A comparison with a random search algorithm further justifies the strength of the method. Thus, universal rules for fooling networks are here shown to exist. Hopefully, the results from this work will impact the development of yet more sample and model agnostic attacks as well as their defenses.

Lexicase selection achieves very good solution quality by introducing ordered test cases. However, the computational complexity of lexicase selection can prohibit its use in many applications. In this paper, we introduce Batch Tournament Selection (BTS), a hybrid of tournament and lexicase selection which is approximately one order of magnitude faster than lexicase selection while achieving a competitive quality of solutions. Tests on a number of regression datasets show that BTS compares well with lexicase selection in terms of mean absolute error while having a speed-up of up to 25 times. Surprisingly, BTS and lexicase selection have almost no difference in both diversity and performance. This reveals that batches and ordered test cases are completely different mechanisms which share the same general principle fostering the specialization of individuals. This work introduces an efficient algorithm that sheds light onto the main principles behind the success of lexicase, potentially opening up a new range of possibilities for algorithms to come.

Recent research has revealed that the output of deep neural networks (DNNs) can be easily altered by adding relatively small perturbations to the input vector. In this paper, we analyze an attack in an extremely limited scenario where only one pixel can be modified. For that we propose a novel method for generating one-pixel adversarial perturbations based on differential evolution (DE). It requires less adversarial information (a black-box attack) and can fool more types of networks due to the inherent features of DE. The results show that 67.97% of the natural images in Kaggle CIFAR-10 test dataset and 16.04% of the ImageNet (ILSVRC 2012) test images can be perturbed to at least one target class by modifying just one pixel with 74.03% and 22.91% confidence on average. We also show the same vulnerability on the original CIFAR-10 dataset. Thus, the proposed attack explores a different take on adversarial machine learning in an extreme limited scenario, showing that current DNNs are also vulnerable to such low dimension attacks. Besides, we also illustrate an important application of DE (or broadly speaking, evolutionary computation) in the domain of adversarial machine learning: creating tools that can effectively generate low-cost adversarial attacks against neural networks for evaluating robustness.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an extension of the traditional Internet, which allows a very large number of smart devices, such as home appliances, network cameras, sensors and controllers to connect to one another to share information and improve user experiences. IoT devices are micro-computers for domain-specific computations rather than traditional function-specific embedded devices. This opens the possibility of seeing many kinds of existing attacks, traditionally targeted at the Internet, also directed at IoT devices. As shown by recent events, such as the Mirai and Brickerbot botnets, DDoS attacks have become very common in IoT environments as these lack basic security monitoring and protection mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a novel light-weight approach for detecting DDos malware in IoT environments. We extract the malware images (i.e., a one-channel gray-scale image converted from a malware binary) and utilize a light-weight convolutional neural network for classifying their families. The experimental results show that the proposed system can achieve 94:0% accuracy for the classification of goodware and DDoS malware and 81:8% accuracy for the classification of goodware and two main malware families.

Learning algorithms are being increasingly adopted in various applications. However, further expansion will require methods that work more automatically. To enable this level of automation, a more powerful solution representation is needed. However, by increasing the representation complexity, a second problem arises. The search space becomes huge, and therefore, an associated scalable and efficient searching algorithm is also required. To solve both the problems, first a powerful representation is proposed that unifies most of the neural networks features from the literature into one representation. Second, a new diversity preserving method called spectrum diversity is created based on the new concept of chromosome spectrum that creates a spectrum out of the characteristics and frequency of alleles in a chromosome. The combination of spectrum diversity with a unified neuron representation enables the algorithm to either surpass or equal NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies on all of the five classes of problems tested. Ablation tests justify the good results, showing the importance of added new features in the unified neuron representation. Part of the success is attributed to the novelty-focused evolution and good scalability with a chromosome size provided by spectrum diversity. Thus, this paper sheds light on a new representation and diversity preserving mechanism that should impact algorithms and applications to come.

In the real world, the environment is constantly changing with the input variables under the effect of noise. However, few algorithms were shown to be able to work under those circumstances. Here, Novelty-Organizing Team of Classifiers (NOTC) is applied to the continuous action mountain car as well as two variations of it: a noisy mountain car and an unstable weather mountain car. These problems take respectively noise and change of problem dynamics into account. Moreover, NOTC is compared with NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) in these problems, revealing a trade-off between the approaches. While NOTC achieves the best performance in all of the problems, NEAT needs less trials to converge. It is demonstrated that NOTC achieves better performance because of its division of the input space (creating easier problems). Unfortunately, this division of input space also requires a bit of time to bootstrap.

Structured evolutionary algorithms have been investigated for some time. However, they have been under explored especially in the field of multi-objective optimization. Despite good results, the use of complex dynamics and structures keep the understanding and adoption rate of structured evolutionary algorithms low. Here, we propose a general subpopulation framework that has the capability of integrating optimization algorithms without restrictions as well as aiding the design of structured algorithms. The proposed framework is capable of generalizing most of the structured evolutionary algorithms, such as cellular algorithms, island models, spatial predator-prey, and restricted mating based algorithms. Moreover, we propose two algorithms based on the general subpopulation framework, demonstrating that with the simple addition of a number of single-objective differential evolution algorithms for each objective, the results improve greatly, even when the combined algorithms behave poorly when evaluated alone at the tests. Most importantly, the comparison between the subpopulation algorithms and their related panmictic algorithms suggests that the competition between different strategies inside one population can have deleterious consequences for an algorithm and reveals a strong benefit of using the subpopulation framework.

Learning classifier systems are adaptive learning systems which have been widely applied in a multitude of application domains. However, there are still some generalization problems unsolved. The hurdle is that fitness and niching pressures are difficult to balance. Here, a new algorithm called Self Organizing Classifiers is proposed which faces this problem from a different perspective. Instead of balancing the pressures, both pressures are separated and no balance is necessary. In fact, the proposed algorithm possesses a dynamical population structure that self-organizes itself to better project the input space into a map. The niched fitness concept is defined along with its dynamical population structure, both are indispensable for the understanding of the proposed method. Promising results are shown on two continuous multi-step problems. One of which is yet more challenging than previous problems of this class in the literature.