This paper provides the first formalisation and empirical demonstration of a particular safety concern in reinforcement learning (RL)-based news and social media recommendation algorithms. This safety concern is what we call "user tampering" -- a phenomenon whereby an RL-based recommender system may manipulate a media user's opinions, preferences and beliefs via its recommendations as part of a policy to increase long-term user engagement. We provide a simulation study of a media recommendation problem constrained to the recommendation of political content, and demonstrate that a Q-learning algorithm consistently learns to exploit its opportunities to 'polarise' simulated 'users' with its early recommendations in order to have more consistent success with later recommendations catering to that polarisation. Finally, we argue that given our findings, designing an RL-based recommender system which cannot learn to exploit user tampering requires making the metric for the recommender's success independent of observable signals of user engagement, and thus that a media recommendation system built solely with RL is necessarily either unsafe, or almost certainly commercially unviable.

Internet of Things (IoT) based applications face an increasing number of potential security risks, which need to be systematically assessed and addressed. Expert-based manual assessment of IoT security is a predominant approach, which is usually inefficient. To address this problem, we propose an automated security assessment framework for IoT networks. Our framework first leverages machine learning and natural language processing to analyze vulnerability descriptions for predicting vulnerability metrics. The predicted metrics are then input into a two-layered graphical security model, which consists of an attack graph at the upper layer to present the network connectivity and an attack tree for each node in the network at the bottom layer to depict the vulnerability information. This security model automatically assesses the security of the IoT network by capturing potential attack paths. We evaluate the viability of our approach using a proof-of-concept smart building system model which contains a variety of real-world IoT devices and potential vulnerabilities. Our evaluation of the proposed framework demonstrates its effectiveness in terms of automatically predicting the vulnerability metrics of new vulnerabilities with more than 90% accuracy, on average, and identifying the most vulnerable attack paths within an IoT network. The produced assessment results can serve as a guideline for cybersecurity professionals to take further actions and mitigate risks in a timely manner.

In light of the emergence of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in recommender systems research and several fruitful results in recent years, this survey aims to provide a timely and comprehensive overview of the recent trends of deep reinforcement learning in recommender systems. We start with the motivation of applying DRL in recommender systems. Then, we provide a taxonomy of current DRL-based recommender systems and a summary of existing methods. We discuss emerging topics and open issues, and provide our perspective on advancing the domain. This survey serves as introductory material for readers from academia and industry into the topic and identifies notable opportunities for further research.

The app has added features to find matches in other ways, profiles that allow users to record snippets on their interests to Tinder Passport, a paid product that gives users the chance to find matches across the world. The company has also expanded into interactive dating features, such as Vibes, a 48-hour event in the app that asks users to respond to a series of questions to match with others who participate. The new Explore section includes more than 15 types of interests, such as "foodies," "gamers," and "animal parents." Different interests will surface to users depending on their locations, the time of day and their own passions. It is available to Tinder users in the U.S., U.K, Australia and New Zealand to start.

Professionals as well as the general public need effective assistance to access, understand and consume complex biomedical concepts. For example, doctors always want to be aware of up-to-date clinical evidence for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases under the scheme of Evidence-based Medicine [165], and the general public is becoming increasingly interested in learning about their own health conditions on the Internet [54]. Traditionally, Information Retrieval (IR) systems, such as PubMed, have been used to meet such information needs. However, classical IR is still not efficient enough [71, 77, 99, 164]. For instance, Russell-Rose and Chamberlain [164] reported that it requires 4 expert hours to answer complex medical queries using search engines. Compared with the retrieval systems that typically return a list of relevant documents for the users to read, Question Answering (QA) systems that provide direct answers to users' questions are more straightforward and intuitive. In general, QA itself is a challenging benchmark Natural Language Processing (NLP) task for evaluating the abilities of intelligent systems to understand a question, retrieve and utilize relevant materials and generate its answer. With the rapid development of computing hardware, modern QA models, especially those based on deep learning [30, 31, 42, 146, 171], achieve comparable or even better performance than human on many benchmark datasets [67, 83, 154, 155, 215] and have been successfully adopted in general domain search engines and conversational assistants [150, 236]. The Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) QA Track has triggered the modern QA research [197], when QA models were mostly based on IR.

The Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast protocol is one of the latest compulsory advances in air surveillance. While it supports the tracking of the ever-growing number of aircraft in the air, it also introduces cybersecurity issues that must be mitigated e.g., false data injection attacks where an attacker emits fake surveillance information. The recent data sources and tools available to obtain flight tracking records allow the researchers to create datasets and develop Machine Learning models capable of detecting such anomalies in En-Route trajectories. In this context, we propose a novel multivariate anomaly detection model called Discriminatory Auto-Encoder (DAE). It uses the baseline of a regular LSTM-based auto-encoder but with several decoders, each getting data of a specific flight phase (e.g. climbing, cruising or descending) during its training.To illustrate the DAE's efficiency, an evaluation dataset was created using real-life anomalies as well as realistically crafted ones, with which the DAE as well as three anomaly detection models from the literature were evaluated. Results show that the DAE achieves better results in both accuracy and speed of detection. The dataset, the models implementations and the evaluation results are available in an online repository, thereby enabling replicability and facilitating future experiments.

With the rapid development of intelligent detection algorithms based on deep learning, much progress has been made in automatic road defect recognition and road marking parsing. This can effectively address the issue of an expensive and time-consuming process for professional inspectors to review the street manually. Towards this goal, we present RoadAtlas, a novel end-to-end integrated system that can support 1) road defect detection, 2) road marking parsing, 3) a web-based dashboard for presenting and inputting data by users, and 4) a backend containing a well-structured database and developed APIs.

Combining a pretrained language model (PLM) with textual patterns has been shown to help in both zero- and few-shot settings. For zero-shot performance, it makes sense to design patterns that closely resemble the text seen during self-supervised pretraining because the model has never seen anything else. Supervised training allows for more flexibility. If we allow for tokens outside the PLM's vocabulary, patterns can be adapted more flexibly to a PLM's idiosyncrasies. Contrasting patterns where a "token" can be any continuous vector vs. those where a discrete choice between vocabulary elements has to be made, we call our method CONtinuous pAtterNs (CONAN). We evaluate CONAN on two established benchmarks for lexical inference in context (LIiC) a.k.a. predicate entailment, a challenging natural language understanding task with relatively small training sets. In a direct comparison with discrete patterns, CONAN consistently leads to improved performance, setting a new state of the art. Our experiments give valuable insights into the kind of pattern that enhances a PLM's performance on LIiC and raise important questions regarding our understanding of PLMs using text patterns.

Robotic touch, particularly when using soft optical tactile sensors, suffers from distortion caused by motion-dependent shear. The manner in which the sensor contacts a stimulus is entangled with the tactile information about the geometry of the stimulus. In this work, we propose a supervised convolutional deep neural network model that learns to disentangle, in the latent space, the components of sensor deformations caused by contact geometry from those due to sliding-induced shear. The approach is validated by reconstructing unsheared tactile images from sheared images and showing they match unsheared tactile images collected with no sliding motion. In addition, the unsheared tactile images give a faithful reconstruction of the contact geometry that is not possible from the sheared data, and robust estimation of the contact pose that can be used for servo control sliding around various 2D shapes. Finally, the contact geometry reconstruction in conjunction with servo control sliding were used for faithful full object reconstruction of various 2D shapes. The methods have broad applicability to deep learning models for robots with a shear-sensitive sense of touch.

Existing well investigated Predictive Process Monitoring techniques typically construct a predictive model based on past process executions, and then use it to predict the future of new ongoing cases, without the possibility of updating it with new cases when they complete their execution. This can make Predictive Process Monitoring too rigid to deal with the variability of processes working in real environments that continuously evolve and/or exhibit new variant behaviours over time. As a solution to this problem, we evaluate the use of three different strategies that allow the periodic rediscovery or incremental construction of the predictive model so as to exploit new available data. The evaluation focuses on the performance of the new learned predictive models, in terms of accuracy and time, against the original one, and uses a number of real and synthetic datasets with and without explicit Concept Drift. The results provide an evidence of the potential of incremental learning algorithms for predicting process monitoring in real environments.