The issue of potential privacy leakage during centralized AI's model training has drawn intensive concern from the public. A Parallel and Distributed Computing (or PDC) scheme, termed Federated Learning (FL), has emerged as a new paradigm to cope with the privacy issue by allowing clients to perform model training locally, without the necessity to upload their personal sensitive data. In FL, the number of clients could be sufficiently large, but the bandwidth available for model distribution and re-upload is quite limited, making it sensible to only involve part of the volunteers to participate in the training process. The client selection policy is critical to an FL process in terms of training efficiency, the final model's quality as well as fairness. In this paper, we will model the fairness guaranteed client selection as a Lyapunov optimization problem and then a C2MAB-based method is proposed for estimation of the model exchange time between each client and the server, based on which we design a fairness guaranteed algorithm termed RBCS-F for problem-solving. The regret of RBCS-F is strictly bounded by a finite constant, justifying its theoretical feasibility. Barring the theoretical results, more empirical data can be derived from our real training experiments on public datasets.

Machine Learning (ML) has been widely applied to cybersecurity and is considered state-of-the-art for solving many of the open issues in that field. However, it is very difficult to evaluate how good the produced solutions are, since the challenges faced in security may not appear in other areas. One of these challenges is the concept drift, which increases the existing arms race between attackers and defenders: malicious actors can always create novel threats to overcome the defense solutions, which may not consider them in some approaches. Due to this, it is essential to know how to properly build and evaluate an ML-based security solution. In this paper, we identify, detail, and discuss the main challenges in the correct application of ML techniques to cybersecurity data. We evaluate how concept drift, evolution, delayed labels, and adversarial ML impact the existing solutions. Moreover, we address how issues related to data collection affect the quality of the results presented in the security literature, showing that new strategies are needed to improve current solutions. Finally, we present how existing solutions may fail under certain circumstances, and propose mitigations to them, presenting a novel checklist to help the development of future ML solutions for cybersecurity.

Global fits of physics models require efficient methods for exploring high-dimensional and/or multimodal posterior functions. We introduce a novel method for accelerating Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling by pairing a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm with a diffusion model that can draw global samples with the aim of approximating the posterior. We briefly review diffusion models in the context of image synthesis before providing a streamlined diffusion model tailored towards low-dimensional data arrays. We then present our adapted Metropolis-Hastings algorithm which combines local proposals with global proposals taken from a diffusion model that is regularly trained on the samples produced during the MCMC run. Our approach leads to a significant reduction in the number of likelihood evaluations required to obtain an accurate representation of the Bayesian posterior across several analytic functions, as well as for a physical example based on a global analysis of parton distribution functions. Our method is extensible to other MCMC techniques, and we briefly compare our method to similar approaches based on normalizing flows. A code implementation can be found at https://github.com/NickHunt-Smith/MCMC-diffusion.

Accurate predictions of electricity demands are necessary for managing operations in a small aggregation load setting like a Microgrid. Due to low aggregation, the electricity demands can be highly stochastic and point estimates would lead to inflated errors. Interval estimation in this scenario, would provide a range of values within which the future values might lie and helps quantify the errors around the point estimates. This paper introduces a residual bootstrap algorithm to generate interval estimates of day-ahead electricity demand. A machine learning algorithm is used to obtain the point estimates of electricity demand and respective residuals on the training set. The obtained residuals are stored in memory and the memory is further partitioned. Days with similar demand patterns are grouped in clusters using an unsupervised learning algorithm and these clusters are used to partition the memory. The point estimates for test day are used to find the closest cluster of similar days and the residuals are bootstrapped from the chosen cluster. This algorithm is evaluated on the real electricity demand data from EULR(End Use Load Research) and is compared to other bootstrapping methods for varying confidence intervals.

We propose a novel end-to-end document understanding model called SeRum (SElective Region Understanding Model) for extracting meaningful information from document images, including document analysis, retrieval, and office automation. Unlike state-of-the-art approaches that rely on multi-stage technical schemes and are computationally expensive, SeRum converts document image understanding and recognition tasks into a local decoding process of the visual tokens of interest, using a content-aware token merge module. This mechanism enables the model to pay more attention to regions of interest generated by the query decoder, improving the model's effectiveness and speeding up the decoding speed of the generative scheme. We also designed several pre-training tasks to enhance the understanding and local awareness of the model. Experimental results demonstrate that SeRum achieves state-of-the-art performance on document understanding tasks and competitive results on text spotting tasks. SeRum represents a substantial advancement towards enabling efficient and effective end-to-end document understanding.

Bruna Moreira da Silva is a PhD student at The University of Melbourne. Her research interests are in bioinformatics, immunoinformatics and machine learning to advance Global Health. David B. Ascher is the Director of Biotechnology at the University of Queensland and head of Computational Biology and Clinical Informatics at the Baker Institute and Systems and Computational Biology at Bio21 Institute. He is interested in developing and applying computational tools to assist leveraging clinical and omics data for drug discovery and personalised medicine. Nicholas Geard is an Associate Professor at the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne and Director of the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform. He is a computer scientist specialising in computational simulation applied to a range of problems in health and epidemiology. Douglas E. V. Pires is an Associate Professor in Digital Health at the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne and group leader at the Bio21 Institute. He is a computer scientist and bioinformatician specialising in machine learning and AI and the development of the next generation of tools to analyse omics data, and guide drug discovery and personalised medicine. ABSTRACT Antibodies, a prominent class of approved biologics, play a crucial role in detecting foreign antigens. The effectiveness of antigen neutralisation and elimination hinges upon the strength, sensitivity, and specificity of the paratope-epitope interaction, which demands resource-intensive experimental techniques for characterisation. In recent years, artificial intelligence and machine learning methods have made significant strides, revolutionising the prediction of protein structures and their complexes. The past decade has also witnessed the evolution of computational approaches aiming to support immunotherapy design. This review focuses on the progress of machine learning-based tools and their frameworks in the domain of B-cell immunotherapy design, encompassing linear and conformational epitope prediction, paratope prediction, and antibody design. We mapped the most commonly used data sources, evaluation metrics, and method availability and thoroughly assessed their significance and limitations, discussing the main challenges ahead. INTRODUCTION Therapeutic antibodies are a rapidly growing class of biopharmaceuticals with potentially exceptional antigen specificity and affinity. Their ability to detect and eliminate a wide array of foreign threats makes them suitable for a range of potential therapeutic and diagnostic applications. Antibody and antigen engineering have been greatly benefited by the evolution of research in computational biology, leading to innovative approaches in screening antibody targets, optimising their biochemical and physical properties, predicting and optimising binding affinity and understanding escape mutations [1].

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a task that requires computers to give correct answers for the input questions based on the images. This task can be solved by humans with ease but is a challenge for computers. The VLSP2022-EVJVQA shared task carries the Visual Question Answering task in the multilingual domain on a newly released dataset: UIT-EVJVQA, in which the questions and answers are written in three different languages: English, Vietnamese and Japanese. We approached the challenge as a sequence-to-sequence learning task, in which we integrated hints from pre-trained state-of-the-art VQA models and image features with Convolutional Sequence-to-Sequence network to generate the desired answers. Our results obtained up to 0.3442 by F1 score on the public test set, 0.4210 on the private test set, and placed 3rd in the competition.

Data-driven evolutionary algorithms usually aim to exploit the information behind a limited amount of data to perform optimization, which have proved to be successful in solving many complex real-world optimization problems. However, most data-driven evolutionary algorithms are centralized, causing privacy and security concerns. Existing federated Bayesian algorithms and data-driven evolutionary algorithms mainly protect the raw data on each client. To address this issue, this paper proposes a secure federated data-driven evolutionary multi-objective optimization algorithm to protect both the raw data and the newly infilled solutions obtained by optimizing the acquisition function conducted on the server. We select the query points on a randomly selected client at each round of surrogate update by calculating the acquisition function values of the unobserved points on this client, thereby reducing the risk of leaking the information about the solution to be sampled. In addition, since the predicted objective values of each client may contain sensitive information, we mask the objective values with Diffie-Hellmann-based noise, and then send only the masked objective values of other clients to the selected client via the server. Since the calculation of the acquisition function also requires both the predicted objective value and the uncertainty of the prediction, the predicted mean objective and uncertainty are normalized to reduce the influence of noise. Experimental results on a set of widely used multi-objective optimization benchmarks show that the proposed algorithm can protect privacy and enhance security with only negligible sacrifice in the performance of federated data-driven evolutionary optimization.

Modern NLP breakthrough includes large multilingual models capable of performing tasks across more than 100 languages. State-of-the-art language models came a long way, starting from the simple one-hot representation of words capable of performing tasks like natural language understanding, common-sense reasoning, or question-answering, thus capturing both the syntax and semantics of texts. At the same time, language models are expanding beyond our known language boundary, even competitively performing over very low-resource dialects of endangered languages. However, there are still problems to solve to ensure an equitable representation of texts through a unified modeling space across language and speakers. In this survey, we shed light on this iterative progression of multilingual text representation and discuss the driving factors that ultimately led to the current state-of-the-art. Subsequently, we discuss how the full potential of language democratization could be obtained, reaching beyond the known limits and what is the scope of improvement in that space.

Users derive value from a recommender system (RS) only to the extent that it is able to surface content (or items) that meet their needs/preferences. While RSs often have a comprehensive view of user preferences across the entire user base, content providers, by contrast, generally have only a local view of the preferences of users that have interacted with their content. This limits a provider's ability to offer new content to best serve the broader population. In this work, we tackle this information asymmetry with content prompting policies. A content prompt is a hint or suggestion to a provider to make available novel content for which the RS predicts unmet user demand. A prompting policy is a sequence of such prompts that is responsive to the dynamics of a provider's beliefs, skills and incentives. We aim to determine a joint prompting policy that induces a set of providers to make content available that optimizes user social welfare in equilibrium, while respecting the incentives of the providers themselves. Our contributions include: (i) an abstract model of the RS ecosystem, including content provider behaviors, that supports such prompting; (ii) the design and theoretical analysis of sequential prompting policies for individual providers; (iii) a mixed integer programming formulation for optimal joint prompting using path planning in content space; and (iv) simple, proof-of-concept experiments illustrating how such policies improve ecosystem health and user welfare.