If you are a fan of video games – and sports – it's officially Madden season. On Friday, Electronic Arts formally launched "Madden NFL 20," the latest version of its popular pro football simulation. Although the video game has finally gone public, some players have been hitting the digital gridiron as early as last week by pre-ordering Madden. This season, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, fresh off his NFL MVP season in 2018, appears on the cover of the game. So what can players expect this year?

Abstract--Online detection of anomalies in time series is a key technique in various event-sensitive scenarios such a s robotic system monitoring, smart sensor networks and data center security. However, the increasing diversity of data sources and demands are making this task more challenging than ever . First, the rapid increase of unlabeled data makes supervise d learning no longer suitable in many cases. Second, a great po rtion of time series have complex seasonality features. Third, on -line anomaly detection needs to be fast and reliable. In view of this, we in this paper adopt an unsupervised prediction-dri ven approach on the basis of a backbone model combining a series decomposition part and an inference part. We then propose a novel metric, Local Trend Inconsistency (L TI), along with a detection algorithm that efficiently computes L TI chronolo gically along the series and marks each data point with a score indica ting its probability of being anomalous. The result shows that our scheme outperforms several representative anomaly detection alg orithms in Area Under Curve (AUC) metric with decent time efficiency. While time series data has been ubiquitous before the coming of big data era, a large number of recently emerging technical scenarios like autonomous driving, edge computi ng and Internet of Things (IoT) pose new challenges to the detection of anomalies in this type of data. In the meantime, detection techniques that can provide early, reliable repo rts of anomaly has become crucial for a wide range of systems requiring 24/7 monitoring services. In cloud data centers, for example, a distributed monitoring system usually collects a variety of log data from virtual machine level to cluster lev el on a regular basis and sends them to a central detection module, which needs to analyze the aggregated time series to detect any anomalous events including hardware breakdown, unavailable services and cyber attacks. This requires an on - line detector capable of making reliable detections (i.e., with strong sensitivity and specificity), otherwise it could bri ng about unnecessary cost of maintenance.

--Recreating cyber-attack alert data with a high level of fidelity is challenging due to the intricate interaction between features, non-homogeneity of alerts, and potential for rare yet critical samples. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been shown to effectively learn complex data distributions with the intent of creating increasingly realistic data. This paper presents the application of GANs to cyber-attack alert data and shows that GANs not only successfully learn to generate realistic alerts, but also reveal feature dependencies within alerts. This is accomplished by reviewing the intersection of histograms for varying alert-feature combinations between the ground truth and generated datsets. Traditional statistical metrics, such as conditional and joint entropy, are also employed to verify the accuracy of these dependencies. Finally, it is shown that a Mutual Information constraint on the network can be used to increase the generation of low probability, critical, alert values. By mapping alerts to a set of attack stages it is shown that the output of these low probability alerts has a direct contextual meaning for Cyber Security analysts. Overall, this work provides the basis for generating new cyber intrusion alerts and provides evidence that synthesized alerts emulate critical dependencies from the source dataset. I NTRODUCTION Classifying, predicting, and generating cyber-attack alert data provides a unique set of challenges due to imbalance and a lack of homogeneity in alert datasets. Furthering these challenges critical exploits in a network are often rare and difficult to identify. Despite this is has been shown that alert data can be used to identify anomalous traffic [1] [2] [3], network vulnerabilities [4], and bad actor behavior profiling [5]. However, to fully realize the potential of cyber-attack alert data, a means to acquire more data and analyze critical dependencies within alerts is needed. This work seeks to provide solutions to these challenges by showing that deep learning models are able to recreate cyber-attack alert data when given representative real world data. This includes a means for driving better coverage of the feature domain in model outputs, allowing more rare but critical events to be synthesized.

Simultaneous inference after model selection is of critical importance to address scientific hypotheses involving a set of parameters. In this paper, we consider high-dimensional linear regression model in which a regularization procedure such as LASSO is applied to yield a sparse model. To establish a simultaneous post-model selection inference, we propose a method of contraction and expansion (MOCE) along the line of debiasing estimation that enables us to balance the bias-and-variance trade-off so that the super-sparsity assumption may be relaxed. We establish key theoretical results for the proposed MOCE procedure from which the expanded model can be selected with theoretical guarantees and simultaneous confidence regions can be constructed by the joint asymptotic normal distribution. In comparison with existing methods, our proposed method exhibits stable and reliable coverage at a nominal significance level with substantially less computational burden, and thus it is trustworthy for its application in solving real-world problems.

When randomized ensemble methods such as bagging and random forests are implemented, a basic question arises: Is the ensemble large enough? In particular, the practitioner desires a rigorous guarantee that a given ensemble will perform nearly as well as an ideal infinite ensemble (trained on the same data). The purpose of the current paper is to develop a bootstrap method for solving this problem in the context of regression --- which complements our companion paper in the context of classification (Lopes 2019). In contrast to the classification setting, the current paper shows that theoretical guarantees for the proposed bootstrap can be established under much weaker assumptions. In addition, we illustrate the flexibility of the method by showing how it can be adapted to measure algorithmic convergence for variable selection. Lastly, we provide numerical results demonstrating that the method works well in a range of situations.

In this paper, we disseminate a new handwritten digits-dataset, termed Kannada-MNIST, for the Kannada script, that can potentially serve as a direct drop-in replacement for the original MNIST dataset. In addition to this dataset, we disseminate an additional real world handwritten dataset (with $10k$ images), which we term as the Dig-MNIST dataset that can serve as an out-of-domain test dataset. We also duly open source all the code as well as the raw scanned images along with the scanner settings so that researchers who want to try out different signal processing pipelines can perform end-to-end comparisons. We provide high level morphological comparisons with the MNIST dataset and provide baselines accuracies for the dataset disseminated. The initial baselines obtained using an oft-used CNN architecture ($96.8\%$ for the main test-set and $76.1\%$ for the Dig-MNIST test-set) indicate that these datasets do provide a sterner challenge with regards to generalizability than MNIST or the KMNIST datasets. We also hope this dissemination will spur the creation of similar datasets for all the languages that use different symbols for the numeral digits.

We consider the task of tensor estimation, i.e. estimating a low-rank 3-order $n \times n \times n$ tensor from noisy observations of randomly chosen entries in the sparse regime. In the context of matrix (2-order tensor) estimation, a variety of algorithms have been proposed and analyzed in the literature including the popular collaborative filtering algorithm that is extremely well utilized in practice. However, in the context of tensor estimation, there is limited progress. No natural extensions of collaborative filtering are known beyond ``flattening'' the tensor into a matrix and applying standard collaborative filtering. As the main contribution of this work, we introduce a generalization of the collaborative filtering algorithm for the setting of tensor estimation and argue that it achieves sample complexity that (nearly) matches the conjectured lower bound on the sample complexity. Interestingly, our generalization uses the matrix obtained from the ``flattened'' tensor to compute similarity as in the classical collaborative filtering but by defining a novel ``graph'' using it. The algorithm recovers the tensor with mean-squared-error (MSE) decaying to $0$ as long as each entry is observed independently with probability $p = \Omega(n^{-3/2 + \epsilon})$ for any arbitrarily small $\epsilon > 0$. It turns out that $p = \Omega(n^{-3/2})$ is the conjectured lower bound as well as ``connectivity threshold'' of graph considered to compute similarity in our algorithm.

Ischaemic stroke is a medical condition caused by occlusion of blood supply to the brain tissue thus forming a lesion. A lesion is zoned into a core associated with irreversible necrosis typically located at the center of the lesion, while reversible hypoxic changes in the outer regions of the lesion are termed as the penumbra. Early estimation of core and penumbra in ischaemic stroke is crucial for timely intervention with thrombolytic therapy to reverse the damage and restore normalcy. Multisequence magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is commonly employed for clinical diagnosis. However, a sequence singly has not been found to be sufficiently able to differentiate between core and penumbra, while a combination of sequences is required to determine the extent of the damage. The challenge, however, is that with an increase in the number of sequences, it cognitively taxes the clinician to discover symptomatic biomarkers in these images. In this paper, we present a data-driven fully automated method for estimation of core and penumbra in ischaemic lesions using diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) and perfusion-weighted imaging (PWI) sequence maps of MRI. The method employs recent developments in convolutional neural networks (CNN) for semantic segmentation in medical images. In the absence of availability of a large amount of labeled data, the CNN is trained using an adversarial approach employing cross-entropy as a segmentation loss along with losses aggregated from three discriminators of which two employ relativistic visual Turing test. This method is experimentally validated on the ISLES-2015 dataset through three-fold cross-validation to obtain with an average Dice score of 0.82 and 0.73 for segmentation of penumbra and core respectively.

Abstract--Recently, NLP models have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we explore adve rsarial attacks on neural machine translation (NMT) systems. Given a sentence in the source language, the goal of the proposed att ack is to change multiple words while ensuring that the predicte d translation remains unchanged. In order to choose the word from the source vocabulary, we propose a soft-attention bas ed technique. The experiments are conducted on two language pa irs: English-German (en-de) and English-French (en-fr) and two state-of-the-art NMT systems: BLSTM-based encoder-decod er with attention and Transformer . The proposed soft-attenti on based technique outperforms existing methods like HotFlip by a significant margin for all the conducted experiments The res ults demonstrate that state-of-the-art NMT systems are unable t o capture the semantics of the source language.

It is a great pleasure to write this tribute in honor of Scott A. Smolka on his 65th birthday. We revisit Goldin, Smolka hypothesis that persistent Turing machine (PTM) can capture the intuitive notion of sequential interaction computation . We propose a topological setting to model the abstract concept of environment. We use it to define a notion of a topological Turing machine (TTM) as a universal model for interactive computation and possible model for concurrent computation.