Learning useful representations is a key ingredient to the success of modern machine learning.

Node centralities play a pivotal role in network science, social network analysis, and recommender systems. In temporal data, static path-based centralities like closeness or betweenness can give misleading results about the true importance of nodes in a temporal graph. To address this issue, temporal generalizations of betweenness and closeness have been defined that are based on the shortest time-respecting paths between pairs of nodes.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) represent the latest generation of neural computation, offering a brain-inspired alternative to conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Unlike ANNs, which depend on continuous-valued signals, SNNs operate using distinct spike events, making them inherently more energy-efficient and temporally dynamic. This study presents a comprehensive analysis of SNN design models, training algorithms, and multi-dimensional performance metrics, including accuracy, energy consumption, latency, spike count, and convergence behavior. Key neuron models such as the Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) and training strategies, including surrogate gradient descent, ANN-to-SNN conversion, and Spike-Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP), are examined in depth. Results show that surrogate gradient-trained SNNs closely approximate ANN accuracy (within 1-2%), with faster convergence by the 20th epoch and latency as low as 10 milliseconds. Converted SNNs also achieve competitive performance but require higher spike counts and longer simulation windows. STDP-based SNNs, though slower to converge, exhibit the lowest spike counts and energy consumption (as low as 5 millijoules per inference), making them optimal for unsupervised and low-power tasks. These findings reinforce the suitability of SNNs for energy-constrained, latency-sensitive, and adaptive applications such as robotics, neuromorphic vision, and edge AI systems. While promising, challenges persist in hardware standardization and scalable training. This study concludes that SNNs, with further refinement, are poised to propel the next phase of neuromorphic computing.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Generative AI (GenAI) offers new opportunities for customer support in online travel agencies, yet little is known about how its design influences user engagement, purchase behavior, and user experience. We report results from a randomized field experiment in online travel itinerary planning, comparing GenAI that expressed (A) positive enthusiasm, (B) neutral expression, and (C) no tone instructions (control). Users in group A wrote significantly longer prompts than those in groups B and C. At the same time, users in groups A and B were more likely to purchase subscriptions of the webservice. We further analyze linguistic cues across experimental groups to explore differences in user experience and explain subscription purchases and affiliate link clicks based on these cues. Our findings provide implications for the design of persuasive and engaging GenAI interfaces in consumer-facing contexts and contribute to understanding how linguistic framing shapes user behavior in AI-mediated decision support.

Attribution of cyber-attacks remains a complex but critical challenge for cyber defenders. Currently, manual extraction of behavioral indicators from dense forensic documentation causes significant attribution delays, especially following major incidents at the international scale. This research evaluates large language models (LLMs) for cyber-attack attribution based on behavioral indicators extracted from forensic documentation. We test OpenAI's GPT-4 and text-embedding-3-large for identifying threat actors' tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) by comparing LLM-generated TTPs against human-generated data from MITRE ATT&CK Groups. Our framework then identifies TTPs from text using vector embedding search and builds profiles to attribute new attacks for a machine learning model to learn. Key contributions include: (1) assessing off-the-shelf LLMs for TTP extraction and attribution, and (2) developing an end-to-end pipeline from raw CTI documents to threat-actor prediction. This research finds that standard LLMs generate TTP datasets with noise, resulting in a low similarity to human-generated datasets. However, the TTPs generated are similar in frequency to those within the existing MITRE datasets. Additionally, although these TTPs are different than human-generated datasets, our work demonstrates that they still prove useful for training a model that performs above baseline on attribution. Project code and files are contained here: https://github.com/kylag/ttp_attribution.

Decoding brain signals accurately and efficiently is crucial for intra-cortical brain-computer interfaces. Traditional decoding approaches based on neural activity vector features suffer from low accuracy, whereas deep learning based approaches have high computational cost. To improve both the decoding accuracy and efficiency, this paper proposes a spiking neural network (SNN) for effective and energy-efficient intra-cortical brain signal decoding. We also propose a feature fusion approach, which integrates the manually extracted neural activity vector features with those extracted by a deep neural network, to further improve the decoding accuracy. Experiments in decoding motor-related intra-cortical brain signals of two rhesus macaques demonstrated that our SNN model achieved higher accuracy than traditional artificial neural networks; more importantly, it was tens or hundreds of times more efficient. The SNN model is very suitable for high precision and low power applications like intra-cortical brain-computer interfaces.

In this paper, we explore the dynamics of structured complex-valued Hopfield neural networks (CvHNNs), which arise when the synaptic weight matrix possesses specific structural properties. We begin by analyzing CvHNNs with a Hermitian synaptic weight matrix and establish the existence of four-cycle dynamics in CvHNNs with skew-Hermitian weight matrices operating synchronously. Furthermore, we introduce two new classes of complex-valued matrices: braided Hermitian and braided skew-Hermitian matrices. We demonstrate that CvHNNs utilizing these matrix types exhibit cycles of length eight when operating in full parallel update mode. Finally, we conduct extensive computational experiments on synchronous CvHNNs, exploring other synaptic weight matrix structures. This work was supported in part by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) under grant no 315820/2021-7, the S ao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) under grant no 2023/03368-0, and the Postdoctoral Researcher Program (PPPD) at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Keywords-- Hopfield neural network, complex-valued neural network, associative memory, braided Hermitian matrix. 1 Introduction Artificial neural networks have been conceived as emulators of the biological neural network synapse process. Their processing units, the artificial neurons, usually act based on input signals received from other neurons or cells. Like a biological neuron firing an electric impulse in the presence of specific chemical components in appropriate concentrations, an artificial neuron fires when certain mathematical conditions are satisfied.

Due to massive adoption of social media, detection of users' depression through social media analytics bears significant importance, particularly for underrepresented languages, such as Bangla. This study introduces a well-grounded approach to identify depressive social media posts in Bangla, by employing advanced natural language processing techniques. The dataset used in this work, annotated by domain experts, includes both depressive and non-depressive posts, ensuring high-quality data for model training and evaluation. To address the prevalent issue of class imbalance, we utilised random oversampling for the minority class, thereby enhancing the model's ability to accurately detect depressive posts. We explored various numerical representation techniques, including Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) embedding and FastText embedding, by integrating them with a deep learning-based Convolutional Neural Network-Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (CNN-BiLSTM) model. The results obtained through extensive experimentation, indicate that the BERT approach performed better the others, achieving a F1-score of 84%. This indicates that BERT, in combination with the CNN-BiLSTM architecture, effectively recognises the nuances of Bangla texts relevant to depressive contents. Comparative analysis with the existing state-of-the-art methods demonstrates that our approach with BERT embedding performs better than others in terms of evaluation metrics and the reliability of dataset annotations. Our research significantly contribution to the development of reliable tools for detecting depressive posts in the Bangla language. By highlighting the efficacy of different embedding techniques and deep learning models, this study paves the way for improved mental health monitoring through social media platforms.