Graph pre-training strategies have been attracting a surge of attention in the graph mining community, due to their flexibility in parameterizing graph neural networks (GNNs) without any label information. The key idea lies in encoding valuable information into the backbone GNNs, by predicting the masked graph signals extracted from the input graphs. In order to balance the importance of diverse graph signals (e.g., nodes, edges, subgraphs), the existing approaches are mostly hand-engineered by introducing hyperparameters to re-weight the importance of graph signals. However, human interventions with sub-optimal hyperparameters often inject additional bias and deteriorate the generalization performance in the downstream applications. This paper addresses these limitations from a new perspective, i.e., deriving curriculum for pre-training GNNs. We propose an end-to-end model named MentorGNN that aims to supervise the pre-training process of GNNs across graphs with diverse structures and disparate feature spaces. To comprehend heterogeneous graph signals at different granularities, we propose a curriculum learning paradigm that automatically re-weighs graph signals in order to ensure a good generalization in the target domain. Moreover, we shed new light on the problem of domain adaption on relational data (i.e., graphs) by deriving a natural and interpretable upper bound on the generalization error of the pre-trained GNNs. Extensive experiments on a wealth of real graphs validate and verify the performance of MentorGNN.

This paper presents Tyche, a Python library to facilitate probabilistic reasoning in uncertain worlds through the construction, querying, and learning of belief models. Tyche uses aleatoric description logic (ADL), which provides computational advantages in its evaluation over other description logics. Tyche belief models can be succinctly created by defining classes of individuals, the probabilistic beliefs about them (concepts), and the probabilistic relationships between them (roles). We also introduce a method of observation propagation to facilitate learning from complex ADL observations. A demonstration of Tyche to predict the author of anonymised messages, and to extract author writing tendencies from anonymised messages, is provided. Tyche has the potential to assist in the development of expert systems, knowledge extraction systems, and agents to play games with incomplete and probabilistic information.

Neuralink, a company co-founded by Elon Musk, has been working on an implantable brain–machine interface since 2016. While it previously demonstrated its progress by showing a Macaque monkey controlling the cursor in a game of Pong, it has yet to start human trials. Now, according to Reuters, Musk has reached out to rival company Synchron in recent weeks to discuss a potential investment. It's unclear what kind of deal Musk has offered -- whether it's a collaboration or a financial investment --since none of the players responded or confirmed the report with the news organization. Reuters' sources also said that a deal isn't certain and that Synchron has yet to decide whether to accept Musk's offer.

Picking up transparent objects is still a challenging task for robots. The visual properties of transparent objects such as reflection and refraction make the current grasping methods that rely on camera sensing fail to detect and localise them. However, humans can handle the transparent object well by first observing its coarse profile and then poking an area of interest to get a fine profile for grasping. Inspired by this, we propose a novel framework of vision-guided tactile poking for transparent objects grasping. In the proposed framework, a segmentation network is first used to predict the horizontal upper regions named as poking regions, where the robot can poke the object to obtain a good tactile reading while leading to minimal disturbance to the object's state. A poke is then performed with a high-resolution GelSight tactile sensor. Given the local profiles improved with the tactile reading, a heuristic grasp is planned for grasping the transparent object. To mitigate the limitations of real-world data collection and labelling for transparent objects, a large-scale realistic synthetic dataset was constructed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed segmentation network can predict the potential poking region with a high mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.360, and the vision-guided tactile poking can enhance the grasping success rate significantly from 38.9% to 85.2%. Thanks to its simplicity, our proposed approach could also be adopted by other force or tactile sensors and could be used for grasping of other challenging objects. All the materials used in this paper are available at https://sites.google.com/view/tactilepoking.

We propose a hybrid machine learning architecture that simultaneously employs multiple deep learning models analyzing contextual and behavioral characteristics of Windows portable executable, producing a final prediction based on a decision from the meta-model. The detection heuristic in contemporary machine learning Windows malware classifiers is typically based on the static properties of the sample since dynamic analysis through virtualization is challenging for vast quantities of samples. To surpass this limitation, we employ a Windows kernel emulation that allows the acquisition of behavioral patterns across large corpora with minimal temporal and computational costs. We partner with a security vendor for a collection of more than 100k int-the-wild samples that resemble the contemporary threat landscape, containing raw PE files and filepaths of applications at the moment of execution. The acquired dataset is at least ten folds larger than reported in related works on behavioral malware analysis. Files in the training dataset are labeled by a professional threat intelligence team, utilizing manual and automated reverse engineering tools. We estimate the hybrid classifier's operational utility by collecting an out-of-sample test set three months later from the acquisition of the training set. We report an improved detection rate, above the capabilities of the current state-of-the-art model, especially under low false-positive requirements. Additionally, we uncover a meta-model's ability to identify malicious activity in validation and test sets even if none of the individual models express enough confidence to mark the sample as malevolent. We conclude that the meta-model can learn patterns typical to malicious samples from representation combinations produced by different analysis techniques. We publicly release pre-trained models and anonymized dataset of emulation reports.

Te reo M\=aori (referred to as M\=aori), New Zealand's indigenous language, is under-resourced in language technology. M\=aori speakers are bilingual, where M\=aori is code-switched with English. Unfortunately, there are minimal resources available for M\=aori language technology, language detection and code-switch detection between M\=aori-English pair. Both English and M\=aori use Roman-derived orthography making rule-based systems for detecting language and code-switching restrictive. Most M\=aori language detection is done manually by language experts. This research builds a M\=aori-English bilingual database of 66,016,807 words with word-level language annotation. The New Zealand Parliament Hansard debates reports were used to build the database. The language labels are assigned using language-specific rules and expert manual annotations. Words with the same spelling, but different meanings, exist for M\=aori and English. These words could not be categorised as M\=aori or English based on word-level language rules. Hence, manual annotations were necessary. An analysis reporting the various aspects of the database such as metadata, year-wise analysis, frequently occurring words, sentence length and N-grams is also reported. The database developed here is a valuable tool for future language and speech technology development for Aotearoa New Zealand. The methodology followed to label the database can also be followed by other low-resourced language pairs.

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to extract the spans of aspect, opinion, and their sentiment relations as sentiment triplets. Existing works usually formulate the span detection as a 1D token tagging problem, and model the sentiment recognition with a 2D tagging matrix of token pairs. Moreover, by leveraging the token representation of Pretrained Language Encoders (PLEs) like BERT, they can achieve better performance. However, they simply leverage PLEs as feature extractors to build their modules but never have a deep look at what specific knowledge does PLEs contain. In this paper, we argue that instead of further designing modules to capture the inductive bias of ASTE, PLEs themselves contain "enough" features for 1D and 2D tagging: (1) The token representation contains the contextualized meaning of token itself, so this level feature carries necessary information for 1D tagging. (2) The attention matrix of different PLE layers can further capture multi-level linguistic knowledge existing in token pairs, which benefits 2D tagging. (3) Furthermore, with simple transformations, these two features can also be easily converted to the 2D tagging matrix and 1D tagging sequence, respectively. That will further boost the tagging results. By doing so, PLEs can be natural tagging frameworks and achieve a new state of the art, which is verified by extensive experiments and deep analyses.

The vessel, developed by the British company Sea-Kit International, is surveying the volcano as part of the second phase of the Tonga Eruption Seabed Mapping Project (TESMaP), led by New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) and funded by the Nippon Foundation of Japan.

Four years ago, the $70 billion Alibaba Group, one of the world's biggest artificial intelligence users, teamed up with Mars, the $35 billion global leader in confectioneries, to figure out the types of candy and chocolates that consumers in China prefer. The fresh consumer data that Alibaba continually gathers from the millions of people shopping on its various platforms turned up the counterintuitive finding that many Chinese who buy chocolates also purchase spicy snacks at the same time. Using that data-driven insight, Mars developed a sweet-and-spicy product: a candy bar that contains Szechuan peppercorns, the source of China's spicy "mala" flavor. Even though Mars didn't conduct any other consumer research to reinforce the A.I.-driven insight, Spicy Snickers proved to be a winner on the mainland. Depending on A.I. also saved the company time; instead of the two to three years that it normally takes to launch a product, Mars was able to bring Spicy Snickers to market for the first time in August 2017, less than 12 months after the collaboration with Alibaba started.

This paper addresses policy learning in non-stationary environments and games with continuous actions. Rather than the classical reward maximization mechanism, inspired by the ideas of follow-the-regularized-leader (FTRL) and mirror descent (MD) update, we propose a no-regret style reinforcement learning algorithm PORL for continuous action tasks. We prove that PORL has a last-iterate convergence guarantee, which is important for adversarial and cooperative games. Empirical studies show that, in stationary environments such as MuJoCo locomotion controlling tasks, PORL performs equally well as, if not better than, the soft actor-critic (SAC) algorithm; in non-stationary environments including dynamical environments, adversarial training, and competitive games, PORL is superior to SAC in both a better final policy performance and a more stable training process.