A Pilot Study of Query-Free Adversarial Attack against Stable Diffusion

Despite the record-breaking performance in Text-to-Image (T2I) generation by Stable Diffusion, less research attention is paid to its adversarial robustness. In this work, we study the problem of adversarial attack generation for Stable Diffusion and ask if an adversarial text prompt can be obtained even in the absence of end-to-end model queries. We call the resulting problem 'query-free attack generation'. To resolve this problem, we show that the vulnerability of T2I models is rooted in the lack of robustness of text encoders, e.g., the CLIP text encoder used for attacking Stable Diffusion. Based on such insight, we propose both untargeted and targeted query-free attacks, where the former is built on the most influential dimensions in the text embedding space, which we call steerable key dimensions. By leveraging the proposed attacks, we empirically show that only a five-character perturbation to the text prompt is able to cause the significant content shift of synthesized images using Stable Diffusion. Moreover, we show that the proposed target attack can precisely steer the diffusion model to scrub the targeted image content without causing much change in untargeted image content.Comment: The 3rd Workshop of Adversarial Machine Learning on Computer Vision: Art of Robustnes

Design and Implementation of a Database-Driven Online Survey System for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Survey by the National Database on Environmental Management Systems (NDEMS) Project

National Database on Environmental Management Systems (NDEMS) is a research project, which collects facilities' environmental management systems (EMS) data nationwide. This year the research team at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) has incorporated a new set of survey instruments -- the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development Survey (OECD Survey) -- into their research. The new survey focuses on new trends in environmental research and the participating research teams are from several countries around the world. The research team at UNC-CH is responsible for the OECD survey data collection in the United States. This project, the OECD Online Survey System involved the design of a database to store OECD survey data, as well as a set of online interfaces and scripts designed and implemented to facilitate data entry from the web interfaces to the back-end database, and an administrative module designed to allow the NDEMS research teams to manage the user account for each facility and the data they submitted. This paper describes the design, development, and user testing of the OECD Online Survey System

The Paradoxical Effects of COVID-19 Event Strength on Employee Turnover Intention

As a global pandemic, the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has brought enormous challenges to employees and organizations. Although numerous existing studies have highlighted that the COVID-19 pandemic is a stressful event and empirically proved its detrimental effect on employee turnover intention, few scholars have noted that this pandemic can deteriorate the external economic and employment environment simultaneously, which may further complicate employees’ intentions to leave or stay in the current organization. Drawing on event system theory and social cognitive theory, this study aims to uncover two potential cognitive mechanisms of the complex impact of COVID-19 event strength on employee turnover intention. To examine the proposed model, this study employed a three-wave and time-lagged research design and collected data from a sample of 432 employees of four Chinese companies from different industries. The findings indicated that COVID-19 event strength was negatively related to perceived external employability, and ultimately curbed employee turnover intention. Yet, COVID-19 event strength also negatively predicted perceived organizational growth, thus influencing employees to exhibit intentions to quit. Moreover, organizational identification not only attenuated the positive effect of perceived external employability on turnover intention but also amplified the negative impact of perceived organizational growth on turnover intention. Further, organizational identification moderated the indirect effects of COVID-19 event strength on turnover intention through perceived external employability and perceived organizational growth. This study provided a comprehensive insight into scholars’ understanding of the COVID-19 downstream outcomes

Anti-cancer and antioxidant properties of phenolics isolated from Toona sinensis A Juss acetone leaf extract

Purpose: To investigate the antioxidant and anticancer activities of phenolics from the leaf extract of Toona sinensis (TS).Methods: Acetone leaf extract of TS was screened for total phenolic and flavanoid contents, and the flanonoids were subjected to high performance liquid  chromatographic (HPLC) analysis. Antioxidant properties were assessed via oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC), peroxyl radical scavenging capacity (PSC) and cellular antioxidant activity (CAA), while anti-proliferative activity ins HepG2 cell line was assessed using methylene blue assay.Results: The extract contained 36.02 ± 0.24 mg of gallic acid equiv/g dry weight (DW) and 20.24 ± 1.73 mg of catechin equiv/g DW of total phenolic and total flavonoid, respectively. The levels of rutin and quercitrin were 0.51 and 19.55 mg/g, respectively. Epicatechin, gallic acid, quercitin, isoquercetin were not detected. The extract showed significant antioxidant potential and high anti-proliferation capacity with low cytotoxicity against HepG2 cell in vitro. The underlying mechanism of anti-proliferative effect was induction of apoptosis.Conclusion: TS leaf extract possesses significant in vitro antioxidant properties and anti-proliferative effect against HepG2 cells, which make it a potential anticancer drug source.Keywords: Toona sinensis, Phenolics, Antioxidants, HepG2 cells, Anti-proliferatio