Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an important branch of artificial intelligence that studies how to enable computers to understand, process, and generate human language. Text classification is a fundamental task in NLP, which aims to classify text into different predefined categories. Text classification is the most basic and classic task in natural language processing, and most of the tasks in natural language processing can be regarded as classification tasks. In recent years, deep learning has achieved great success in many research fields, and today, it has also become a standard technology in the field of NLP, which is widely integrated into text classification tasks. Unlike numbers and images, text processing emphasizes fine-grained processing ability. Traditional text classification methods generally require preprocessing the input model's text data. Additionally, they also need to obtain good sample features through manual annotation and then use classical machine learning algorithms for classification. Therefore, this paper analyzes the application status of deep learning in the three core tasks of NLP (including text representation, word order modeling, and knowledge representation). This content explores the improvement and synergy achieved through natural language processing in the context of text classification, while also taking into account the challenges posed by adversarial techniques in text generation, text classification, and semantic parsing. An empirical study on text classification tasks demonstrates the effectiveness of interactive integration training, particularly in conjunction with TextCNN, highlighting the significance of these advancements in text classification augmentation and enhancement.

Machine learning has become a common approach to predicting the outcomes of soccer matches, and the body of literature in this domain has grown substantially in the past decade and a half. This chapter discusses available datasets, the types of models and features, and ways of evaluating model performance in this application domain. The aim of this chapter is to give a broad overview of the current state and potential future developments in machine learning for soccer match results prediction, as a resource for those interested in conducting future studies in the area. Our main findings are that while gradient-boosted tree models such as CatBoost, applied to soccer-specific ratings such as pi-ratings, are currently the best-performing models on datasets containing only goals as the match features, there needs to be a more thorough comparison of the performance of deep learning models and Random Forest on a range of datasets with different types of features. Furthermore, new rating systems using both player- and team-level information and incorporating additional information from, e.g., spatiotemporal tracking and event data, could be investigated further. Finally, the interpretability of match result prediction models needs to be enhanced for them to be more useful for team management.

Signed graphs are an emergent way of representing data in a variety of contexts were conflicting interactions exist. These include data from biological, ecological, and social systems. Here we propose the concept of communicability geometry for signed graphs, proving that metrics in this space, such as the communicability distance and angles, are Euclidean and spherical. We then apply these metrics to solve several problems in data analysis of signed graphs in a unified way. They include the partitioning of signed graphs, dimensionality reduction, finding hierarchies of alliances in signed networks as well as the quantification of the degree of polarization between the existing factions in systems represented by this type of graphs.

The increasing utilization of emerging technologies in the Food & Agriculture (FA) sector has heightened the need for security to minimize cyber risks. Considering this aspect, this manuscript reviews disclosed and documented cybersecurity incidents in the FA sector. For this purpose, thirty cybersecurity incidents were identified, which took place between July 2011 and April 2023. The details of these incidents are reported from multiple sources such as: the private industry and flash notifications generated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), internal reports from the affected organizations, and available media sources. Considering the available information, a brief description of the security threat, ransom amount, and impact on the organization are discussed for each incident. This review reports an increased frequency of cybersecurity threats to the FA sector. To minimize these cyber risks, popular cybersecurity frameworks and recent agriculture-specific cybersecurity solutions are also discussed. Further, the need for AI assurance in the FA sector is explained, and the Farmer-Centered AI (FCAI) framework is proposed. The main aim of the FCAI framework is to support farmers in decision-making for agricultural production, by incorporating AI assurance. Lastly, the effects of the reported cyber incidents on other critical infrastructures, food security, and the economy are noted, along with specifying the open issues for future development.

Continual learning requires a model to adapt to ongoing changes in the data distribution, and often to the set of tasks to be performed. It is rare, however, that the data and task changes are completely unpredictable. Given a description of an overarching goal or data theme, which we call a realm, humans can often guess what concepts are associated with it. We show here that the combination of a large language model and an image generation model can similarly provide useful premonitions as to how a continual learning challenge might develop over time. We use the large language model to generate text descriptions of semantically related classes that might potentially appear in the data stream in future. These descriptions are then rendered using Stable Diffusion to generate new labelled image samples. The resulting synthetic dataset is employed for supervised pre-training, but is discarded prior to commencing continual learning, along with the pre-training classification head. We find that the backbone of our pre-trained networks can learn representations useful for the downstream continual learning problem, thus becoming a valuable input to any existing continual learning method. Although there are complexities arising from the domain gap between real and synthetic images, we show that pre-training models in this manner improves multiple Class Incremenal Learning (CIL) methods on fine-grained image classification benchmarks.

This paper describes how to analyze the influence of Earth system variables on the errors when providing temperature forecasts. The initial framework to get the data has been based on previous research work, which resulted in a very interesting discovery. However, the aforementioned study only worked on individual correlations of the variables with respect to the error. This research work is going to re-use the main ideas but introduce three main novelties: (1) applying a data science approach by a few representative locations; (2) taking advantage of the rankings created by Spearman correlation but enriching them with other metrics looking for a more robust ranking of the variables; (3) evaluation of the methodology by learning random forest models for regression with the distinct experimental variations. The main contribution is the framework that shows how to convert correlations into rankings and combine them into an aggregate ranking. We have carried out experiments on five chosen locations to analyze the behavior of this ranking-based methodology. The results show that the specific performance is dependent on the location and season, which is expected, and that this selection technique works properly with Random Forest models but can also improve simpler regression models such as Bayesian Ridge. This work also contributes with an extensive analysis of the results. We can conclude that this selection based on the top-k ranked variables seems promising for this real problem, and it could also be applied in other domains.

Yield forecasting, the science of predicting agricultural productivity before the crop harvest occurs, helps a wide range of stakeholders make better decisions around agricultural planning. This study aims to investigate whether machine learning-based yield prediction models can capably predict Kharif season rice yields at the district level in India several months before the rice harvest takes place. The methodology involved training 19 machine learning models such as CatBoost, LightGBM, Orthogonal Matching Pursuit, and Extremely Randomized Trees on 20 years of climate, satellite, and rice yield data across 247 of Indian rice-producing districts. In addition to model-building, a dynamic dashboard was built understand how the reliability of rice yield predictions varies across districts. The results of the proof-of-concept machine learning pipeline demonstrated that rice yields can be predicted with a reasonable degree of accuracy, with out-of-sample R2, MAE, and MAPE performance of up to 0.82, 0.29, and 0.16 respectively. These results outperformed test set performance reported in related literature on rice yield modeling in other contexts and countries. In addition, SHAP value analysis was conducted to infer both the importance and directional impact of the climate and remote sensing variables included in the model. Important features driving rice yields included temperature, soil water volume, and leaf area index. In particular, higher temperatures in August correlate with increased rice yields, particularly when the leaf area index in August is also high. Building on the results, a proof-of-concept dashboard was developed to allow users to easily explore which districts may experience a rise or fall in yield relative to the previous year.

The transferability of deep neural networks (DNNs) has made significant progress in image and language processing. However, due to the heterogeneity among tables, such DNN bonus is still far from being well exploited on tabular data prediction (e.g., regression or classification tasks). Condensing knowledge from diverse domains, language models (LMs) possess the capability to comprehend feature names from various tables, potentially serving as versatile learners in transferring knowledge across distinct tables and diverse prediction tasks, but their discrete text representation space is inherently incompatible with numerical feature values in tables. In this paper, we present TP-BERTa, a specifically pre-trained LM for tabular data prediction. Concretely, a novel relative magnitude tokenization converts scalar numerical feature values to finely discrete, high-dimensional tokens, and an intra-feature attention approach integrates feature values with the corresponding feature names. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our pre-trained TP-BERTa leads the performance among tabular DNNs and is competitive with Gradient Boosted Decision Tree models in typical tabular data regime.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms require substantial samples and computational resources to achieve higher performance, which restricts their practical application and poses challenges for further development. Given the constraint of limited resources, it is essential to leverage existing computational work (e.g., learned policies, samples) to enhance sample efficiency and reduce the computational resource consumption of DRL algorithms. Previous works to leverage existing computational work require intrusive modifications to existing algorithms and models, designed specifically for specific algorithms, lacking flexibility and universality. In this paper, we present the Snapshot Reinforcement Learning (SnapshotRL) framework, which enhances sample efficiency by simply altering environments, without making any modifications to algorithms and models. By allowing student agents to choose states in teacher trajectories as the initial state to sample, SnapshotRL can effectively utilize teacher trajectories to assist student agents in training, allowing student agents to explore a larger state space at the early training phase. We propose a simple and effective SnapshotRL baseline algorithm, S3RL, which integrates well with existing DRL algorithms. Our experiments demonstrate that integrating S3RL with TD3, SAC, and PPO algorithms on the MuJoCo benchmark significantly improves sample efficiency and average return, without extra samples and additional computational resources.

Diabetes, resulting from inadequate insulin production or utilization, causes extensive harm to the body. Existing diagnostic methods are often invasive and come with drawbacks, such as cost constraints. Although there are machine learning models like Classwise k Nearest Neighbor (CkNN) and General Regression Neural Network (GRNN), they struggle with imbalanced data and result in under-performance. Leveraging advancements in sensor technology and machine learning, we propose a non-invasive diabetes diagnosis using a Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) with batch normalization, incorporating data re-sampling and normalization for class balancing. Our method addresses existing challenges such as limited performance associated with traditional machine learning. Experimental results on three datasets show significant improvements in overall accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity compared to traditional methods. Notably, we achieve accuracies of 89.81% in Pima diabetes dataset, 75.49% in CDC BRFSS2015 dataset, and 95.28% in Mesra Diabetes dataset. This underscores the potential of deep learning models for robust diabetes diagnosis. See project website https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/DiabetesDiagnosis/