For years, a group of Chinese hackers known variously as Barium, Winnti, or APT41 has carried out a unique mix of sophisticated hacking activities that has puzzled the cybersecurity researchers tracking them. At times they appear focused on the usual state-sponsored espionage, believed to be working in the service of the Chinese Ministry of State Security. At other times their attacks looked more like traditional cybercrime. Now a set of federal indictments has called out those intruders by name, and cast their activities in a new light. Five Chinese hackers are accused of a sprawling scheme to break into the networks of hundreds of global companies in a broad range of industries, as well as think tanks, universities, foreign government agencies, and the accounts of Hong Kong government officials and pro-democracy activists.

Transformer model architectures have garnered immense interest lately due to their effectiveness across a range of domains like language, vision and reinforcement learning. In the field of natural language processing for example, Transformers have become an indispensable staple in the modern deep learning stack. Recently, a dizzying number of "X-former" models have been proposed - Reformer, Linformer, Performer, Longformer, to name a few - which improve upon the original Transformer architecture, many of which make improvements around computational and memory efficiency. With the aim of helping the avid researcher navigate this flurry, this paper characterizes a large and thoughtful selection of recent efficiency-flavored "X-former" models, providing an organized and comprehensive overview of existing work and models across multiple domains.

By considering rational agents, we focus on the problem of selecting goals out of a set of incompatible ones. We consider three forms of incompatibility introduced by Castelfranchi and Paglieri, namely the terminal, the instrumental (or based on resources), and the superfluity. We represent the agent's plans by means of structured arguments whose premises are pervaded with uncertainty. We measure the strength of these arguments in order to determine the set of compatible goals. We propose two novel ways for calculating the strength of these arguments, depending on the kind of incompatibility that exists between them. The first one is the logical strength value, it is denoted by a three-dimensional vector, which is calculated from a probabilistic interval associated with each argument. The vector represents the precision of the interval, the location of it, and the combination of precision and location. This type of representation and treatment of the strength of a structured argument has not been defined before by the state of the art. The second way for calculating the strength of the argument is based on the cost of the plans (regarding the necessary resources) and the preference of the goals associated with the plans. Considering our novel approach for measuring the strength of structured arguments, we propose a semantics for the selection of plans and goals that is based on Dung's abstract argumentation theory. Finally, we make a theoretical evaluation of our proposal.

We present CoDEx, a set of knowledge graph Completion Datasets Extracted from Wikidata and Wikipedia that improve upon existing knowledge graph completion benchmarks in scope and level of difficulty. In terms of scope, CoDEx comprises three knowledge graphs varying in size and structure, multilingual descriptions of entities and relations, and tens of thousands of hard negative triples that are plausible but verified to be false. To characterize CoDEx, we contribute thorough empirical analyses and benchmarking experiments. First, we analyze each CoDEx dataset in terms of logical relation patterns. Next, we report baseline link prediction and triple classification results on CoDEx for five extensively tuned embedding models. Finally, we differentiate CoDEx from a popular link prediction benchmark by showing that CoDEx covers more diverse and interpretable content, and contains fewer relation patterns that can be covered by trivial frequency-based rules. Data, code, and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/tsafavi/codex.

Data classification is a major machine learning paradigm, which has been widely applied to solve a large number of real-world problems. Traditional data classification techniques consider only physical features (e.g., distance, similarity, or distribution) of the input data. For this reason, those are called \textit{low-level} classification. On the other hand, the human (animal) brain performs both low and high orders of learning and it has a facility in identifying patterns according to the semantic meaning of the input data. Data classification that considers not only physical attributes but also the pattern formation is referred to as \textit{high-level} classification. Several high-level classification techniques have been developed, which make use of complex networks to characterize data patterns and have obtained promising results. In this paper, we propose a pure network-based high-level classification technique that uses the betweenness centrality measure. We test this model in nine different real datasets and compare it with other nine traditional and well-known classification models. The results show us a competent classification performance.

Estimating time-varying graphical models are of paramount importance in various social, financial, biological, and engineering systems, since the evolution of such networks can be utilized for example to spot trends, detect anomalies, predict vulnerability, and evaluate the impact of interventions. Existing methods require extensive tuning of parameters that control the graph sparsity and temporal smoothness. Furthermore, these methods are computationally burdensome with time complexity O(NP^3) for P variables and N time points. As a remedy, we propose a low-complexity tuning-free Bayesian approach, named BADGE. Specifically, we impose temporally-dependent spike-and-slab priors on the graphs such that they are sparse and varying smoothly across time. A variational inference algorithm is then derived to learn the graph structures from the data automatically. Owning to the pseudo-likelihood and the mean-field approximation, the time complexity of BADGE is only O(NP^2). Additionally, by identifying the frequency-domain resemblance to the time-varying graphical models, we show that BADGE can be extended to learning frequency-varying inverse spectral density matrices, and yields graphical models for multivariate stationary time series. Numerical results on both synthetic and real data show that that BADGE can better recover the underlying true graphs, while being more efficient than the existing methods, especially for high-dimensional cases.

Strategic recommendations (SR) refer to the problem where an intelligent agent observes the sequential behaviors and activities of users and decides when and how to interact with them to optimize some long-term objectives, both for the user and the business. These systems are in their infancy in the industry and in need of practical solutions to some fundamental research challenges. At Adobe research, we have been implementing such systems for various use-cases, including points of interest recommendations, tutorial recommendations, next step guidance in multi-media editing software, and ad recommendation for optimizing lifetime value. There are many research challenges when building these systems, such as modeling the sequential behavior of users, deciding when to intervene and offer recommendations without annoying the user, evaluating policies offline with high confidence, safe deployment, non-stationarity, building systems from passive data that do not contain past recommendations, resource constraint optimization in multi-user systems, scaling to large and dynamic actions spaces, and handling and incorporating human cognitive biases. In this paper we cover various use-cases and research challenges we solved to make these systems practical.

We present a new meta-learning approach for supervised anomaly classification / one-class classification using set equivariant networks. We focus our experiments on an astronomy application. Our problem setting is composed of a set of classification tasks. Each task has a (small) set of positive, labeled examples and a larger set of unlabeled examples. We expect the positive instances to be much more uncommon (i.e. 'anomalies') than the negative ones ('normal' class). We propose a novel use of equivariant networks for this setting. Specifically we use Deep Sets, which was developed for point-clouds and unordered sets and is equivariant to permutation. We propose to consider the set of positive examples of a given task as a 'point-cloud'. The key idea is that the network directly takes as input the set of positive examples in addition to the current example to classify. This allows the model to predict at test-time on new tasks using only positive labeled examples (i.e 'One-Class classification' setting) by design, potentially without retraining. However, the model is trained in a meta-learning regime on a dataset of several tasks with full-supervision (positive and negative labels). This setup is motivated by our target application on stellar streams. Streams are groups of stars sharing specific properties in various features. For a detected stream, we can determine a set of stars that likely belong to the stream. We aim to characterize the membership of all other nearby stars. We build a meta-dataset of simulated streams injected onto real data and evaluate on unseen synthetic streams and one known stream. Our experiments show encouraging results to explore furthermore equivariant networks for anomaly or 'one-class' classification in a meta-learning regime.

Some abstract argumentation approaches consider that arguments have a degree of uncertainty, which impacts on the degree of uncertainty of the extensions obtained from a abstract argumentation framework (AAF) under a semantics. In these approaches, both the uncertainty of the arguments and of the extensions are modeled by means of precise probability values. However, in many real life situations the exact probabilities values are unknown and sometimes there is a need for aggregating the probability values of different sources. In this paper, we tackle the problem of calculating the degree of uncertainty of the extensions considering that the probability values of the arguments are imprecise. We use credal sets to model the uncertainty values of arguments and from these credal sets, we calculate the lower and upper bounds of the extensions. We study some properties of the suggested approach and illustrate it with an scenario of decision making.

That's just one example of how machine learning is bringing unique Latin American solutions to unique Latin American challenges.