Background: Software Vulnerability (SV) prediction needs large-sized and high-quality data to perform well. Current SV datasets mostly require expensive labeling efforts by experts (human-labeled) and thus are limited in size. Meanwhile, there are growing efforts in automatic SV labeling at scale. However, the fitness of auto-labeled data for SV prediction is still largely unknown. Aims: We quantitatively and qualitatively study the quality and use of the state-of-the-art auto-labeled SV data, D2A, for SV prediction. Method: Using multiple sources and manual validation, we curate clean SV data from human-labeled SV-fixing commits in two well-known projects for investigating the auto-labeled counterparts. Results: We discover that 50+% of the auto-labeled SVs are noisy (incorrectly labeled), and they hardly overlap with the publicly reported ones. Yet, SV prediction models utilizing the noisy auto-labeled SVs can perform up to 22% and 90% better in Matthews Correlation Coefficient and Recall, respectively, than the original models. We also reveal the promises and difficulties of applying noise-reduction methods for automatically addressing the noise in auto-labeled SV data to maximize the data utilization for SV prediction. Conclusions: Our study informs the benefits and challenges of using auto-labeled SVs, paving the way for large-scale SV prediction.

Matching in two-sided markets such as ride-hailing has recently received significant attention. However, existing studies on ride-hailing mainly focus on optimising efficiency, and fairness issues in ride-hailing have been neglected. Fairness issues in ride-hailing, including significant earning differences between drivers and variance of passenger waiting times among different locations, have potential impacts on economic and ethical aspects. The recent studies that focus on fairness in ride-hailing exploit traditional optimisation methods and the Markov Decision Process to balance efficiency and fairness. However, there are several issues in these existing studies, such as myopic short-term decision-making from traditional optimisation and instability of fairness in a comparably longer horizon from both traditional optimisation and Markov Decision Process-based methods. To address these issues, we propose a dynamic Markov Decision Process model to alleviate fairness issues currently faced by ride-hailing, and seek a balance between efficiency and fairness, with two distinct characteristics: (i) a prediction module to predict the number of requests that will be raised in the future from different locations to allow the proposed method to consider long-term fairness based on the whole timeline instead of consider fairness only based on historical and current data patterns; (ii) a customised scalarisation function for multi-objective multi-agent Q Learning that aims to balance efficiency and fairness. Extensive experiments on a publicly available real-world dataset demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

With Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models demonstrating powerful multimodal interaction capabilities, the application scenarios of neural networks are no longer confined to unimodal domains but have expanded to more complex multimodal V+L downstream tasks. The security vulnerabilities of unimodal models have been extensively examined, whereas those of VLP models remain challenging. We note that in CV models, the understanding of images comes from annotated information, while VLP models are designed to learn image representations directly from raw text. Motivated by this discrepancy, we developed the Feature Guidance Attack (FGA), a novel method that uses text representations to direct the perturbation of clean images, resulting in the generation of adversarial images. FGA is orthogonal to many advanced attack strategies in the unimodal domain, facilitating the direct application of rich research findings from the unimodal to the multimodal scenario. By appropriately introducing text attack into FGA, we construct Feature Guidance with Text Attack (FGA-T). Through the interaction of attacking two modalities, FGA-T achieves superior attack effects against VLP models. Moreover, incorporating data augmentation and momentum mechanisms significantly improves the black-box transferability of FGA-T. Our method demonstrates stable and effective attack capabilities across various datasets, downstream tasks, and both black-box and white-box settings, offering a unified baseline for exploring the robustness of VLP models.

While the abundance of rich and vast datasets across numerous fields has facilitated the advancement of natural language processing, sectors in need of specialized data types continue to struggle with the challenge of finding quality data. Our study introduces a novel guidance data augmentation technique utilizing abstracted context and sentence structures to produce varied sentences while maintaining context-entity relationships, addressing data scarcity challenges. By fostering a closer relationship between context, sentence structure, and role of entities, our method enhances data augmentation's effectiveness. Consequently, by showcasing diversification in both entity-related vocabulary and overall sentence structure, and simultaneously improving the training performance of named entity recognition task.

In the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence, time series forecasting plays a pivotal role across various domains such as finance, healthcare, and weather. However, the task of selecting the most suitable forecasting method for a given dataset is a complex task due to the diversity of data patterns and characteristics. This research aims to address this challenge by proposing a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating and ranking time series forecasting methods across a wide range of datasets. This study investigates the comparative performance of many methods from two prominent time series forecasting frameworks, AutoGluon-Timeseries, and sktime to shed light on their applicability in different real-world scenarios. This research contributes to the field of time series forecasting by providing a robust benchmarking methodology, and facilitating informed decision-making when choosing forecasting methods for achieving optimal prediction.

The rise of social media and the exponential growth of multimodal communication necessitates advanced techniques for Multimodal Information Extraction (MIE). However, existing methodologies primarily rely on direct Image-Text interactions, a paradigm that often faces significant challenges due to semantic and modality gaps between images and text. In this paper, we introduce a new paradigm of Image-Context-Text interaction, where large multimodal models (LMMs) are utilized to generate descriptive textual context to bridge these gaps. In line with this paradigm, we propose a novel Shapley Value-based Contrastive Alignment (Shap-CA) method, which aligns both context-text and context-image pairs. Shap-CA initially applies the Shapley value concept from cooperative game theory to assess the individual contribution of each element in the set of contexts, texts and images towards total semantic and modality overlaps. Following this quantitative evaluation, a contrastive learning strategy is employed to enhance the interactive contribution within context-text/image pairs, while minimizing the influence across these pairs. Furthermore, we design an adaptive fusion module for selective cross-modal fusion. Extensive experiments across four MIE datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Resilience is defined as the ability of a network to resist, adapt, and quickly recover from disruptions, and to continue to maintain an acceptable level of services from users' perspective. With the advent of future radio networks, including advanced 5G and upcoming 6G, critical services become integral to future networks, requiring uninterrupted service delivery for end users. Unfortunately, with the growing network complexity, user mobility and diversity, it becomes challenging to scale current resilience management techniques that rely on local optimizations to large dense network deployments. This paper aims to address this problem by globally optimizing the resilience of a dense multi-cell network based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning. Specifically, our proposed solution can dynamically tilt cell antennas and reconfigure transmit power to mitigate outages and increase both coverage and service availability. A multi-objective optimization problem is formulated to simultaneously satisfy resiliency constraints while maximizing the service quality in the network area in order to minimize the impact of outages on neighbouring cells. Extensive simulations then demonstrate that with our proposed solution, the average service availability in terms of user throughput can be increased by up to 50-60% on average, while reaching a coverage availability of 99% in best cases.

In this paper, we develop an unsupervised learning approach to earthquake detection. We train a specific class of deep auto-encoders that learn to reproduce the input waveforms after a data-compressive bottleneck, and then use a simple triggering algorithm at the bottleneck to label waveforms as noise or signal. Our approach is motivated by the intuition that efficient compression of data should represent signals differently from noise, and is facilitated by a time-axis-preserving approach to auto-encoding and intuitively-motivated choices on the architecture and triggering. We demonstrate that the detection performance of the unsupervised approach is comparable to, and in some cases better than, some of the state-of-the-art supervised methods. Moreover, it has strong \emph{cross-dataset generalization}. By experimenting with various modifications, we demonstrate that the detection performance is insensitive to various technical choices made in the algorithm. Our approach has the potential to be useful for other signal detection problems with time series data.

As a branch of advanced artificial intelligence, dialogue systems are prospering. Multi-turn response selection is a general research problem in dialogue systems. With the assistance of background information and pre-trained language models, the performance of state-of-the-art methods on this problem gains impressive improvement. However, existing studies neglect the importance of external commonsense knowledge. Hence, we design a Siamese network where a pre-trained Language model merges with a Graph neural network (SinLG). SinLG takes advantage of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to catch the word correlations in the context and response candidates and utilizes a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to reason helpful common sense from an external knowledge graph. The GNN aims to assist the PLM in fine-tuning, and arousing its related memories to attain better performance. Specifically, we first extract related concepts as nodes from an external knowledge graph to construct a subgraph with the context response pair as a super node for each sample. Next, we learn two representations for the context response pair via both the PLM and GNN. A similarity loss between the two representations is utilized to transfer the commonsense knowledge from the GNN to the PLM. Then only the PLM is used to infer online so that efficiency can be guaranteed. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on two variants of the PERSONA-CHAT dataset, which proves that our solution can not only improve the performance of the PLM but also achieve an efficient inference.

Dr. Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist and prolific author, has often been described as a cheerleader for science, reason, and humanism. He is often maligned by his critics as a defender of the status quo. Much of his research focuses on slow and steady incremental improvements that have defined rapid human development, both in the United States and globally, over the past century. His 2018 book, "Enlightenment Now" was famously cited by Bill Gates as "his new favorite book," and became a focal point for global policymakers. He is a fierce defender of liberalism, democracy, and market economies, and believes a variety of forces are conspiring against them: populism of both the right and left, religious fundamentalism, and political correctness, among others. He also has emerged as a champion of reasoned, civil debate on college campuses, pushing back against cancel culture, and what he views as a'political monoculture' in academia.