Client: Cross-variable Linear Integrated Enhanced Transformer for Multivariate Long-Term Time Series Forecasting

Long-term time series forecasting (LTSF) is a crucial aspect of modern society, playing a pivotal role in facilitating long-term planning and developing early warning systems. While many Transformer-based models have recently been introduced for LTSF, a doubt have been raised regarding the effectiveness of attention modules in capturing cross-time dependencies. In this study, we design a mask-series experiment to validate this assumption and subsequently propose the "Cross-variable Linear Integrated ENhanced Transformer for Multivariate Long-Term Time Series Forecasting" (Client), an advanced model that outperforms both traditional Transformer-based models and linear models. Client employs linear modules to learn trend information and attention modules to capture cross-variable dependencies. Meanwhile, it simplifies the embedding and position encoding layers and replaces the decoder module with a projection layer. Essentially, Client incorporates non-linearity and cross-variable dependencies, which sets it apart from conventional linear models and Transformer-based models. Extensive experiments with nine real-world datasets have confirmed the SOTA performance of Client with the least computation time and memory consumption compared with the previous Transformer-based models. Our code is available at https://github.com/daxin007/Client

Exploring Transferability of Multimodal Adversarial Samples for Vision-Language Pre-training Models with Contrastive Learning

Vision-language pre-training models (VLP) are vulnerable, especially to multimodal adversarial samples, which can be crafted by adding imperceptible perturbations on both original images and texts. However, under the black-box setting, there have been no works to explore the transferability of multimodal adversarial attacks against the VLP models. In this work, we take CLIP as the surrogate model and propose a gradient-based multimodal attack method to generate transferable adversarial samples against the VLP models. By applying the gradient to optimize the adversarial images and adversarial texts simultaneously, our method can better search for and attack the vulnerable images and text information pairs. To improve the transferability of the attack, we utilize contrastive learning including image-text contrastive learning and intra-modal contrastive learning to have a more generalized understanding of the underlying data distribution and mitigate the overfitting of the surrogate model so that the generated multimodal adversarial samples have a higher transferability for VLP models. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed method

A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON SOFTWARE PIRACY BETWEEN CHINA AND AMERICA

Software piracy in China has been a serious problem for decades. This paper builds on an existing software piracy model and adds a cultural dimension. We aim to study the differences between the U.S. and Chinese college students on their attitude toward software piracy, perceived punishment, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control and piracy intention. Through the data analysis, we aim to find the key factors that influence the piracy intent, to identify the differences between the Chinese and Americans, and to provide insights to fight piracy in China