Application security is an essential part of developing modern software, as lots of attacks depend on vulnerabilities in software. The number of attacks is increasing globally due to technological advancements. Companies must include security in every stage of developing, testing, and deploying their software in order to prevent data breaches. There are several methods to detect software vulnerability Non-AI-based such as Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST). However, these approaches have substantial false-positive and false-negative rates. On the other side, researchers have been interested in developing an AI-based vulnerability detection system employing deep learning models like BERT, BLSTM, etc. In this paper, we proposed a two-stage solution, two deep learning models were proposed for vulnerability detection in C/C++ source codes, the first stage is CNN which detects if the source code contains any vulnerability (binary classification model) and the second stage is CNN-LTSM that classifies this vulnerability into a class of 50 different types of vulnerabilities (multiclass classification model). Experiments were done on SySeVR dataset. Results show an accuracy of 99% for the first and 98% for the second stage.

Transactive Memory System (TMS) is a group theory that describes how communication can enable the combination of individual minds into a group. While this theory has been extensively studied in human-human groups, it has not yet been formally applied to socially assistive robot design. We demonstrate how the three-phase TMS group communication process-which involves encoding, storage, and retrieval-can be leveraged to improve decision making in socially assistive robots with multiple stakeholders. By clearly defining how the robot is gaining information, storing and updating its memory, and retrieving information from its memory, we believe that socially assistive robots can make better decisions and provide more transparency behind their actions in the group context. Bringing communication theory to robot design can provide a clear framework to help robots integrate better into human-human group dynamics and thus improve their acceptance and use.

Gradient preconditioning is a key technique to integrate the second-order information into gradients for improving and extending gradient-based learning algorithms. In deep learning, stochasticity, nonconvexity, and high dimensionality lead to a wide variety of gradient preconditioning methods, with implementation complexity and inconsistent performance and feasibility. We propose the Automatic Second-order Differentiation Library (ASDL), an extension library for PyTorch, which offers various implementations and a plug-and-play unified interface for gradient preconditioning. ASDL enables the study and structured comparison of a range of gradient preconditioning methods.

Conditional inference on joint textual and visual clues is a multi-modal reasoning task that textual clues provide prior permutation or external knowledge, which are complementary with visual content and pivotal to deducing the correct option. Previous methods utilizing pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performances, yet they show a lack of multimodal context reasoning capability, especially for text-modal information. To address this issue, we propose a Multi-modal Context Reasoning approach, named ModCR. Compared to VLMs performing reasoning via cross modal semantic alignment, it regards the given textual abstract semantic and objective image information as the pre-context information and embeds them into the language model to perform context reasoning. Different from recent vision-aided language models used in natural language processing, ModCR incorporates the multi-view semantic alignment information between language and vision by introducing the learnable alignment prefix between image and text in the pretrained language model. This makes the language model well-suitable for such multi-modal reasoning scenario on joint textual and visual clues. We conduct extensive experiments on two corresponding data sets and experimental results show significantly improved performance (exact gain by 4.8% on PMR test set) compared to previous strong baselines. Code Link: \url{https://github.com/YunxinLi/Multimodal-Context-Reasoning}.

Recent works on form understanding mostly employ multimodal transformers or large-scale pre-trained language models. These models need ample data for pre-training. In contrast, humans can usually identify key-value pairings from a form only by looking at layouts, even if they don't comprehend the language used. No prior research has been conducted to investigate how helpful layout information alone is for form understanding. Hence, we propose a unique entity-relation graph parsing method for scanned forms called LAGNN, a language-independent Graph Neural Network model. Our model parses a form into a word-relation graph in order to identify entities and relations jointly and reduce the time complexity of inference. This graph is then transformed by deterministic rules into a fully connected entity-relation graph. Our model simply takes into account relative spacing between bounding boxes from layout information to facilitate easy transfer across languages. To further improve the performance of LAGNN, and achieve isomorphism between entity-relation graphs and word-relation graphs, we use integer linear programming (ILP) based inference. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/Bhanu068/LAGNN

Evolutionary algorithms are known to be robust to noise in the evaluation of the fitness. In particular, larger offspring population sizes often lead to strong robustness. We analyze to what extent the $(1+(\lambda,\lambda))$ genetic algorithm is robust to noise. This algorithm also works with larger offspring population sizes, but an intermediate selection step and a non-standard use of crossover as repair mechanism could render this algorithm less robust than, e.g., the simple $(1+\lambda)$ evolutionary algorithm. Our experimental analysis on several classic benchmark problems shows that this difficulty does not arise. Surprisingly, in many situations this algorithm is even more robust to noise than the $(1+\lambda)$~EA.

Optimal Transport (OT) is a mathematical framework that first emerged in the eighteenth century and has led to a plethora of methods for answering many theoretical and applied questions. The last decade is a witness of the remarkable contributions of this classical optimization problem to machine learning. This paper is about where and how optimal transport is used in machine learning with a focus on the question of salable optimal transport. We provide a comprehensive survey of optimal transport while ensuring an accessible presentation as permitted by the nature of the topic and the context. First, we explain optimal transport background and introduce different flavors (i.e. mathematical formulations), properties, and notable applications. We then address the fundamental question of how to scale optimal transport to cope with the current demands of big and high dimensional data. We conduct a systematic analysis of the methods used in the literature for scaling OT and present the findings in a unified taxonomy. We conclude with presenting some open challenges and discussing potential future research directions. A live repository of related OT research papers is maintained in https://github.com/abdelwahed/OT_for_big_data.git.

Regularization techniques are crucial to improving the generalization performance and training efficiency of deep neural networks. Many deep learning algorithms rely on weight decay, dropout, batch/layer normalization to converge faster and generalize. Label Smoothing (LS) is another simple, versatile and efficient regularization which can be applied to various supervised classification tasks. Conventional LS, however, regardless of the training instance assumes that each non-target class is equally likely. In this work, we present a general framework for training with label regularization, which includes conventional LS but can also model instance-specific variants. Based on this formulation, we propose an efficient way of learning LAbel regularization by devising a Bi-level Optimization (LABO) problem. We derive a deterministic and interpretable solution of the inner loop as the optimal label smoothing without the need to store the parameters or the output of a trained model. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments and demonstrate our LABO consistently yields improvement over conventional label regularization on various fields, including seven machine translation and three image classification tasks across various

We present $\textbf{$\texttt{SkillQG}$}$: a question generation framework with controllable comprehension types for assessing and improving machine reading comprehension models. Existing question generation systems widely differentiate questions by $\textit{literal}$ information such as question words and answer types to generate semantically relevant questions for a given context. However, they rarely consider the $\textit{comprehension}$ nature of questions, i.e. the different comprehension capabilities embodied by different questions. In comparison, our $\texttt{SkillQG}$ is able to tailor a fine-grained assessment and improvement to the capabilities of question answering models built on it. Specifically, we first frame the comprehension type of questions based on a hierarchical skill-based schema, then formulate $\texttt{SkillQG}$ as a skill-conditioned question generator. Furthermore, to improve the controllability of generation, we augment the input text with question focus and skill-specific knowledge, which are constructed by iteratively prompting the pre-trained language models. Empirical results demonstrate that $\texttt{SkillQG}$ outperforms baselines in terms of quality, relevance, and skill-controllability while showing a promising performance boost in downstream question answering task.

Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) integrates First-Order Logic (FOL) and probability theory for learning and inference over relational data. Probabilistic inference and learning in many SRL models can be reduced to Weighted First Order Model Counting (WFOMC). However, WFOMC is known to be intractable ($\mathrm{\#P_1-}$ complete). Hence, logical fragments that admit polynomial time WFOMC are of significant interest. Such fragments are called domain liftable. Recent line of works have shown the two-variable fragment of FOL, extended with counting quantifiers ($\mathrm{C^2}$) to be domain-liftable. However, many properties of real-world data can not be modelled in $\mathrm{C^2}$. In fact many ubiquitous properties of real-world data are inexressible in FOL. Acyclicity is one such property, found in citation networks, genealogy data, temporal data e.t.c. In this paper we aim to address this problem by investigating the domain liftability of directed acyclicity constraints. We show that the fragment $\mathrm{C^2}$ with a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) axiom, i.e., a predicate in the language is axiomatized to represent a DAG, is domain-liftable. We present a method based on principle of inclusion-exclusion for WFOMC of $\mathrm{C^2}$ formulas extended with DAG axioms.