Oceania
A Comparative Analysis of Transfer Learning-based Techniques for the Classification of Melanocytic Nevi
Skin cancer is a fatal manifestation of cancer. Unrepaired deoxyribo-nucleic acid (DNA) in skin cells, causes genetic defects in the skin and leads to skin cancer. To deal with lethal mortality rates coupled with skyrocketing costs of medical treatment, early diagnosis is mandatory. To tackle these challenges, researchers have developed a variety of rapid detection tools for skin cancer. Lesion-specific criteria are utilized to distinguish benign skin cancer from malignant melanoma. In this study, a comparative analysis has been performed on five Transfer Learning-based techniques that have the potential to be leveraged for the classification of melanocytic nevi. These techniques are based on deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) that have been pre-trained on thousands of open-source images and are used for day-to-day classification tasks in many instances.
Semantic Similarity-Based Clustering of Findings From Security Testing Tools
Schneider, Phillip, Voggenreiter, Markus, Gulraiz, Abdullah, Matthes, Florian
Over the last years, software development in domains with high security demands transitioned from traditional methodologies to uniting modern approaches from software development and operations (DevOps). Key principles of DevOps gained more importance and are now applied to security aspects of software development, resulting in the automation of security-enhancing activities. In particular, it is common practice to use automated security testing tools that generate reports after inspecting a software artifact from multiple perspectives. However, this raises the challenge of generating duplicate security findings. To identify these duplicate findings manually, a security expert has to invest resources like time, effort, and knowledge. A partial automation of this process could reduce the analysis effort, encourage DevOps principles, and diminish the chance of human error. In this study, we investigated the potential of applying Natural Language Processing for clustering semantically similar security findings to support the identification of problem-specific duplicate findings. Towards this goal, we developed a web application for annotating and assessing security testing tool reports and published a human-annotated corpus of clustered security findings. In addition, we performed a comparison of different semantic similarity techniques for automatically grouping security findings. Finally, we assess the resulting clusters using both quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods.
A general framework for optimising cost-effectiveness of pandemic response under partial intervention measures
Nguyen, Quang Dang, Prokopenko, Mikhail
The COVID-19 pandemic created enormous public health and socioeconomic challenges. The health effects of vaccination and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were often contrasted with significant social and economic costs. We describe a general framework aimed to derive adaptive cost-effective interventions, adequate for both recent and emerging pandemic threats. We also quantify the net health benefits and propose a reinforcement learning approach to optimise adaptive NPIs. The approach utilises an agent-based model simulating pandemic responses in Australia, and accounts for a heterogeneous population with variable levels of compliance fluctuating over time and across individuals. Our analysis shows that a significant net health benefit may be attained by adaptive NPIs formed by partial social distancing measures, coupled with moderate levels of the society's willingness to pay for health gains (health losses averted). We demonstrate that a socially acceptable balance between health effects and incurred economic costs is achievable over a long term, despite possible early setbacks.
Power BI Developer
Lendi Group is Australia's fastest-growing Fintech business and we're building a technology-enabled platform to take the hard work out of home loans. We're passionate about how technology can revolutionise our industry and solve a key pain point in peoples' lives. In an ever-changing regulatory environment, Lendi Group is leading the charge in developing industry-first technology designed to offer Australian home owners transparency, simplicity and convenience in their home loan experience. Data is forefront in this charge as we look to automate and build out scalable and reliable systems to support our customers and counterparty banks. Join of a growing team of 11 data professionals and use your inquisitive nature and attention to detail to surface key trends to the wider business.
In-game Toxic Language Detection: Shared Task and Attention Residuals
Jia, Yuanzhe, Wu, Weixuan, Cao, Feiqi, Han, Soyeon Caren
In-game toxic language becomes the hot potato in the gaming industry and community. There have been several online game toxicity analysis frameworks and models proposed. However, it is still challenging to detect toxicity due to the nature of in-game chat, which has extremely short length. In this paper, we describe how the in-game toxic language shared task has been established using the real-world in-game chat data. In addition, we propose and introduce the model/framework for toxic language token tagging (slot filling) from the in-game chat. The data and code will be released.
A Light-weight, Effective and Efficient Model for Label Aggregation in Crowdsourcing
Yang, Yi, Zhao, Zhong-Qiu, Bai, Quan, Liu, Qing, Li, Weihua
Due to the noises in crowdsourced labels, label aggregation (LA) has emerged as a standard procedure to post-process crowdsourced labels. LA methods estimate true labels from crowdsourced labels by modeling worker qualities. Most existing LA methods are iterative in nature. They need to traverse all the crowdsourced labels multiple times in order to jointly and iteratively update true labels and worker qualities until convergence. Consequently, these methods have high space and time complexities. In this paper, we treat LA as a dynamic system and model it as a Dynamic Bayesian network. From the dynamic model we derive two light-weight algorithms, LA\textsuperscript{onepass} and LA\textsuperscript{twopass}, which can effectively and efficiently estimate worker qualities and true labels by traversing all the labels at most twice. Due to the dynamic nature, the proposed algorithms can also estimate true labels online without re-visiting historical data. We theoretically prove the convergence property of the proposed algorithms, and bound the error of estimated worker qualities. We also analyze the space and time complexities of the proposed algorithms and show that they are equivalent to those of majority voting. Experiments conducted on 20 real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can effectively and efficiently aggregate labels in both offline and online settings even if they traverse all the labels at most twice.
A Blockchain Protocol for Human-in-the-Loop AI
Dehouche, Nassim, Blythman, Richard
Intelligent human inputs are required both in the training and operation of AI systems, and within the governance of blockchain systems and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). This paper presents a formal definition of Human Intelligence Primitives (HIPs), and describes the design and implementation of an Ethereum protocol for their on-chain collection, modeling, and integration in machine learning workflows.
Concept-based Explanations using Non-negative Concept Activation Vectors and Decision Tree for CNN Models
This paper evaluates whether training a decision tree based on concepts extracted from a concept-based explainer can increase interpretability for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) models and boost the fidelity and performance of the used explainer. CNNs for computer vision have shown exceptional performance in critical industries. However, it is a significant barrier when deploying CNNs due to their complexity and lack of interpretability. Recent studies to explain computer vision models have shifted from extracting low-level features (pixel-based explanations) to mid-or high-level features (concept-based explanations). The current research direction tends to use extracted features in developing approximation algorithms such as linear or decision tree models to interpret an original model. In this work, we modify one of the state-of-the-art concept-based explanations and propose an alternative framework named TreeICE. We design a systematic evaluation based on the requirements of fidelity (approximate models to original model's labels), performance (approximate models to ground-truth labels), and interpretability (meaningful of approximate models to humans). We conduct computational evaluation (for fidelity and performance) and human subject experiments (for interpretability) We find that Tree-ICE outperforms the baseline in interpretability and generates more human readable explanations in the form of a semantic tree structure. This work features how important to have more understandable explanations when interpretability is crucial.
UniMASK: Unified Inference in Sequential Decision Problems
Carroll, Micah, Paradise, Orr, Lin, Jessy, Georgescu, Raluca, Sun, Mingfei, Bignell, David, Milani, Stephanie, Hofmann, Katja, Hausknecht, Matthew, Dragan, Anca, Devlin, Sam
Randomly masking and predicting word tokens has been a successful approach in pre-training language models for a variety of downstream tasks. In this work, we observe that the same idea also applies naturally to sequential decision making, where many well-studied tasks like behavior cloning, offline reinforcement learning, inverse dynamics, and waypoint conditioning correspond to different sequence maskings over a sequence of states, actions, and returns. We introduce the Uni[MASK] framework, which provides a unified way to specify models which can be trained on many different sequential decision making tasks. We show that a single Uni[MASK] model is often capable of carrying out many tasks with performance similar to or better than single-task models. Additionally, after fine-tuning, our Uni[MASK] models consistently outperform comparable single-task models. Our code is publicly available here.
BENK: The Beran Estimator with Neural Kernels for Estimating the Heterogeneous Treatment Effect
Kirpichenko, Stanislav R., Utkin, Lev V., Konstantinov, Andrei V.
A method for estimating the conditional average treatment effect under condition of censored time-to-event data called BENK (the Beran Estimator with Neural Kernels) is proposed. The main idea behind the method is to apply the Beran estimator for estimating the survival functions of controls and treatments. Instead of typical kernel functions in the Beran estimator, it is proposed to implement kernels in the form of neural networks of a specific form called the neural kernels. The conditional average treatment effect is estimated by using the survival functions as outcomes of the control and treatment neural networks which consists of a set of neural kernels with shared parameters. The neural kernels are more flexible and can accurately model a complex location structure of feature vectors. Various numerical simulation experiments illustrate BENK and compare it with the well-known T-learner, S-learner and X-learner for several types of the control and treatment outcome functions based on the Cox models, the random survival forest and the Nadaraya-Watson regression with Gaussian kernels. The code of proposed algorithms implementing BENK is available in https://github.com/Stasychbr/BENK.