The paper focuses on the a posteriori tuning of a generative model in order to favor the generation of good instances in the sense of some external differentiable criterion. The proposed approach, called Boltzmann Tuning of Generative Models (BTGM), applies to a wide range of applications. It covers conditional generative modelling as a particular case, and offers an affordable alternative to rejection sampling. The contribution of the paper is twofold. Firstly, the objective is formalized and tackled as a well-posed optimization problem; a practical methodology is proposed to choose among the candidate criteria representing the same goal, the one best suited to efficiently learn a tuned generative model. Secondly, the merits of the approach are demonstrated on a real-world application, in the context of robust design for energy policies, showing the ability of BTGM to sample the extreme regions of the considered criteria.

In this paper, we introduce UnifiedM2, a general-purpose misinformation model that jointly models multiple domains of misinformation with a single, unified setup. The model is trained to handle four tasks: detecting news bias, clickbait, fake news, and verifying rumors. By grouping these tasks together, UnifiedM2learns a richer representation of misinformation, which leads to state-of-the-art or comparable performance across all tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that UnifiedM2's learned representation is helpful for few-shot learning of unseen misinformation tasks/datasets and model's generalizability to unseen events.

In February, 2011, an Israeli computer scientist named Noam Slonim proposed building a machine that would be better than people at something that seems inextricably human: arguing about politics. Slonim, who had done his doctoral work on machine learning, works at an I.B.M. Research facility in Tel Aviv, and he had watched with pride a few days before as the company's natural-language-processing machine, Watson, won "Jeopardy!" Afterward, I.B.M. sent an e-mail to thousands of researchers across its global network of labs, soliciting ideas for a "grand challenge" to follow the "Jeopardy!" It occurred to Slonim that they might try to build a machine that could defeat a champion debater. He made a single-slide presentation, and then a somewhat more elaborate one, and then a more elaborate one still, and, after many rounds competing against many other I.B.M. researchers, Slonim won the chance to build his machine, which he called Project Debater.

Cross-Lingual Word Embeddings (CLWEs) encode words from two or more languages in a shared high-dimensional space in which vectors representing words with similar meaning (regardless of language) are closely located. Existing methods for building high-quality CLWEs learn mappings that minimise the $\ell_{2}$ norm loss function. However, this optimisation objective has been demonstrated to be sensitive to outliers. Based on the more robust Manhattan norm (aka. $\ell_{1}$ norm) goodness-of-fit criterion, this paper proposes a simple post-processing step to improve CLWEs. An advantage of this approach is that it is fully agnostic to the training process of the original CLWEs and can therefore be applied widely. Extensive experiments are performed involving ten diverse languages and embeddings trained on different corpora. Evaluation results based on bilingual lexicon induction and cross-lingual transfer for natural language inference tasks show that the $\ell_{1}$ refinement substantially outperforms four state-of-the-art baselines in both supervised and unsupervised settings. It is therefore recommended that this strategy be adopted as a standard for CLWE methods.

It is well known that recurrent neural networks (RNNs) faced limitations in learning long-term dependencies that have been addressed by memory structures in long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. Matrix neural networks feature matrix representation which inherently preserves the spatial structure of data and has the potential to provide better memory structures when compared to canonical neural networks that use vector representation. Neural Turing machines (NTMs) are novel RNNs that implement notion of programmable computers with neural network controllers to feature algorithms that have copying, sorting, and associative recall tasks. In this paper, we study the augmentation of memory capacity with a matrix representation of RNNs and NTMs (MatNTMs). We investigate if matrix representation has a better memory capacity than the vector representations in conventional neural networks. We use a probabilistic model of the memory capacity using Fisher information and investigate how the memory capacity for matrix representation networks are limited under various constraints, and in general, without any constraints. In the case of memory capacity without any constraints, we found that the upper bound on memory capacity to be $N^2$ for an $N\times N$ state matrix. The results from our experiments using synthetic algorithmic tasks show that MatNTMs have a better learning capacity when compared to its counterparts.

This paper models residential consumers' energy-consumption behavior by load patterns and distributions and reveals the relationship between consumers' load patterns and socioeconomic features by machine learning. We analyze the real-world smart meter data and extract load patterns using K-Medoids clustering, which is robust to outliers. We develop an analytical framework with feature selection and deep learning models to estimate the relationship between load patterns and socioeconomic features. Specifically, we use an entropy-based feature selection method to identify the critical socioeconomic characteristics that affect load patterns and benefit our method's interpretability. We further develop a customized deep neural network model to characterize the relationship between consumers' load patterns and selected socioeconomic features. Numerical studies validate our proposed framework using Pecan Street smart meter data and survey. We demonstrate that our framework can capture the relationship between load patterns and socioeconomic information and outperform benchmarks such as regression and single DNN models.

This paper discusses the need of an automated system for detecting print errors and the efficacy of Convolutional Neural Networks in such an application. We recognise the need of a dataset containing print error samples and propose a way to generate one artificially. We discuss the algorithms to generate such data along with the limitaions and advantages of such an apporach. Our final trained network gives a remarkable accuracy of 99.83\% in testing. We further evaluate how such efficiency was achieved and what modifications can be tested to further the results.

Tensor Decomposition Networks(TDNs) prevail for their inherent compact architectures. For providing convenience, we present a toolkit named TedNet that is based on the Pytorch framework, to give more researchers a flexible way to exploit TDNs. TedNet implements 5 kinds of tensor decomposition(i.e., CANDECOMP/PARAFAC(CP), Block-Term Tucker(BT), Tucker-2, Tensor Train(TT) and Tensor Ring(TR)) on traditional deep neural layers, the convolutional layer and the fully-connected layer. By utilizing these basic layers, it is simple to construct a variety of TDNs like TR-ResNet, TT-LSTM, etc. TedNet is available at https://github.com/tnbar/tednet.

This is clearly demonstrated by the performance of BALD. To be specific, the BNNs trained with BALD have accuracies ranging from 70 90%, but for the models-under-test M-FashionMNIST and M-MNIST-ES (average & bad models), the metric estimation accuracies range from 90 100% - which are much higher than the BNNs' accuracies. For our proposed method ALT-MAS, with the models-under-test M-FashionMNIST, M-MNIST-ES, the behaviours are similar to those of BALD. That is, the metric estimation accuracies are always higher than the BNNs accuracies, especially for per-class metrics. It is worth noting that, for the per-class metrics, even though the BNNs accuracies by ALT-MAS are much lower than the BNNs by BALD, but the metric estimations by ALT-MAS are much higher than by BALD. This asserts the motivation of our sampling approach, that is, the BNN only needs to accurately predict the data points that contribute to the metric estimation. On the other hand, with the good model-under-test M-MNIST, due to our data augmentation training strategy, the BNN accuracies by ALT-MAS are much higher than those of BALD, and thus, the metric estimations by ALT-MAS are also more accurate than those by BALD. Figure 2: The accuracy of the BNN, for each combination of model-under-test (M-MNIST, M-FashionMNIST, & M-MNIST-ES) and metric set. Plotting mean and standard error over 3 repetitions (Best seen in color).

Machine Learning (ML) techniques are becoming an invaluable support for network intrusion detection, especially in revealing anomalous flows, which often hide cyber-threats. Typically, ML algorithms are exploited to classify/recognize data traffic on the basis of statistical features such as inter-arrival times, packets length distribution, mean number of flows, etc. Dealing with the vast diversity and number of features that typically characterize data traffic is a hard problem. This results in the following issues: i) the presence of so many features leads to lengthy training processes (particularly when features are highly correlated), while prediction accuracy does not proportionally improve; ii) some of the features may introduce bias during the classification process, particularly those that have scarce relation with the data traffic to be classified. To this end, by reducing the feature space and retaining only the most significant features, Feature Selection (FS) becomes a crucial pre-processing step in network management and, specifically, for the purposes of network intrusion detection. In this review paper, we complement other surveys in multiple ways: i) evaluating more recent datasets (updated w.r.t. obsolete KDD 99) by means of a designed-from-scratch Python-based procedure; ii) providing a synopsis of most credited FS approaches in the field of intrusion detection, including Multi-Objective Evolutionary techniques; iii) assessing various experimental analyses such as feature correlation, time complexity, and performance. Our comparisons offer useful guidelines to network/security managers who are considering the incorporation of ML concepts into network intrusion detection, where trade-offs between performance and resource consumption are crucial.