Steganography and steganalysis are two interrelated aspects of the field of information security. Steganography seeks to conceal communications, whereas steganalysis is aimed to either find them or even, if possible, recover the data they contain. Steganography and steganalysis have attracted a great deal of interest, particularly from law enforcement. Steganography is often used by cybercriminals and even terrorists to avoid being captured while in possession of incriminating evidence, even encrypted, since cryptography is prohibited or restricted in many countries. Therefore, knowledge of cutting-edge techniques to uncover concealed information is crucial in exposing illegal acts. Over the last few years, a number of strong and reliable steganography and steganalysis techniques have been introduced in the literature. This review paper provides a comprehensive overview of deep learning-based steganalysis techniques used to detect hidden information within digital media. The paper covers all types of cover in steganalysis, including image, audio, and video, and discusses the most commonly used deep learning techniques. In addition, the paper explores the use of more advanced deep learning techniques, such as deep transfer learning (DTL) and deep reinforcement learning (DRL), to enhance the performance of steganalysis systems. The paper provides a systematic review of recent research in the field, including data sets and evaluation metrics used in recent studies. It also presents a detailed analysis of DTL-based steganalysis approaches and their performance on different data sets. The review concludes with a discussion on the current state of deep learning-based steganalysis, challenges, and future research directions.

Recommender systems help people find relevant content in a personalized way. One main promise of such systems is that they are able to increase the visibility of items in the long tail, i.e., the lesser-known items in a catalogue. Existing research, however, suggests that in many situations today's recommendation algorithms instead exhibit a popularity bias, meaning that they often focus on rather popular items in their recommendations. Such a bias may not only lead to limited value of the recommendations for consumers and providers in the short run, but it may also cause undesired reinforcement effects over time. In this paper, we discuss the potential reasons for popularity bias and we review existing approaches to detect, quantify and mitigate popularity bias in recommender systems. Our survey therefore includes both an overview of the computational metrics used in the literature as well as a review of the main technical approaches to reduce the bias. We furthermore critically discuss today's literature, where we observe that the research is almost entirely based on computational experiments and on certain assumptions regarding the practical effects of including long-tail items in the recommendations.

Evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO) algorithms have been demonstrated to be effective in solving multi-criteria decision-making problems. In real-world applications, analysts often employ several algorithms concurrently and compare their solution sets to gain insight into the characteristics of different algorithms and explore a broader range of feasible solutions. However, EMO algorithms are typically treated as black boxes, leading to difficulties in performing detailed analysis and comparisons between the internal evolutionary processes. Inspired by the successful application of visual analytics tools in explainable AI, we argue that interactive visualization can significantly enhance the comparative analysis between multiple EMO algorithms. In this paper, we present a visual analytics framework that enables the exploration and comparison of evolutionary processes in EMO algorithms. Guided by a literature review and expert interviews, the proposed framework addresses various analytical tasks and establishes a multi-faceted visualization design to support the comparative analysis of intermediate generations in the evolution as well as solution sets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework through case studies on benchmarking and real-world multi-objective optimization problems to elucidate how analysts can leverage our framework to inspect and compare diverse algorithms.

Multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) is a critical field in many large-scale robotic applications, often being the fundamental step in multi-agent systems. The increasing complexity of MAPF in complex and crowded environments, however, critically diminishes the effectiveness of existing solutions. In contrast to other studies that have either presented a general overview of the recent advancements in MAPF or extensively reviewed Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) within multi-agent system settings independently, our work presented in this review paper focuses on highlighting the integration of DRL-based approaches in MAPF. Moreover, we aim to bridge the current gap in evaluating MAPF solutions by addressing the lack of unified evaluation metrics and providing comprehensive clarification on these metrics. Finally, our paper discusses the potential of model-based DRL as a promising future direction and provides its required foundational understanding to address current challenges in MAPF. Our objective is to assist readers in gaining insight into the current research direction, providing unified metrics for comparing different MAPF algorithms and expanding their knowledge of model-based DRL to address the existing challenges in MAPF.

Automated driving has the potential to revolutionize personal, public, and freight mobility. Besides the enormous challenge of perception, i.e. accurately perceiving the environment using available sensor data, automated driving comprises planning a safe, comfortable, and efficient motion trajectory. To promote safety and progress, many works rely on modules that predict the future motion of surrounding traffic. Modular automated driving systems commonly handle prediction and planning as sequential separate tasks. While this accounts for the influence of surrounding traffic on the ego-vehicle, it fails to anticipate the reactions of traffic participants to the ego-vehicle's behavior. Recent works suggest that integrating prediction and planning in an interdependent joint step is necessary to achieve safe, efficient, and comfortable driving. While various models implement such integrated systems, a comprehensive overview and theoretical understanding of different principles are lacking. We systematically review state-of-the-art deep learning-based prediction, planning, and integrated prediction and planning models. Different facets of the integration ranging from model architecture and model design to behavioral aspects are considered and related to each other. Moreover, we discuss the implications, strengths, and limitations of different integration methods. By pointing out research gaps, describing relevant future challenges, and highlighting trends in the research field, we identify promising directions for future research.

Script identification and text recognition are some of the major domains in the application of Artificial Intelligence. In this era of digitalization, the use of digital note-taking has become a common practice. Still, conventional methods of using pen and paper is a prominent way of writing. This leads to the classification of scripts based on the method they are obtained. A survey on the current methodologies and state-of-art methods used for processing and identification would prove beneficial for researchers. The aim of this article is to discuss the advancement in the techniques for script pre-processing and text recognition. In India there are twelve prominent Indic scripts, unlike the English language, these scripts have layers of characteristics. Complex characteristics such as similarity in text shape make them difficult to recognize and analyze, thus this requires advance preprocessing methods for their accurate recognition. A sincere attempt is made in this survey to provide a comparison between all algorithms. We hope that this survey would provide insight to a researcher working not only on Indic scripts but also other languages.

In today's rapidly evolving urban landscapes, efficient and accurate mapping of road infrastructure is critical for optimizing transportation systems, enhancing road safety, and improving the overall mobility experience for drivers and commuters. Yet, a formidable bottleneck obstructs progress - the laborious and time-intensive manual identification of intersections. Simply considering the shear number of intersections that need to be identified, and the labor hours required per intersection, the need for an automated solution becomes undeniable. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach that leverages connected vehicle data and cutting-edge deep learning techniques. By employing geohashing to segment vehicle trajectories and then generating image representations of road segments, we utilize the YOLOv5 (You Only Look Once version 5) algorithm for accurate classification of both straight road segments and intersections. Experimental results demonstrate an impressive overall classification accuracy of 95%, with straight roads achieving a remarkable 97% F1 score and intersections reaching a 90% F1 score. This approach not only saves time and resources but also enables more frequent updates and a comprehensive understanding of the road network. Our research showcases the potential impact on traffic management, urban planning, and autonomous vehicle navigation systems. The fusion of connected vehicle data and deep learning models holds promise for a transformative shift in road infrastructure mapping, propelling us towards a smarter, safer, and more connected transportation ecosystem.

Code summarization aims to generate concise natural language descriptions for source code. The prevailing approaches adopt transformer-based encoder-decoder architectures, where the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of the source code is utilized for encoding structural information. However, ASTs are much longer than the corresponding source code, and existing methods ignore this size constraint by directly feeding the entire linearized AST into the encoders. This simplistic approach makes it challenging to extract truly valuable dependency relations from the overlong input sequence and leads to significant computational overhead due to self-attention applied to all nodes in the AST. To address this issue effectively and efficiently, we present a model, AST-MHSA that uses multi-head attention to extract the important semantic information from the AST. The model consists of two main components: an encoder and a decoder. The encoder takes as input the abstract syntax tree (AST) of the code and generates a sequence of hidden states. The decoder then takes these hidden states as input and generates a natural language summary of the code. The multi-head attention mechanism allows the model to learn different representations of the input code, which can be combined to generate a more comprehensive summary. The model is trained on a dataset of code and summaries, and the parameters of the model are optimized to minimize the loss between the generated summaries and the ground-truth summaries.

This paper provides an overview of the historical progression of distributed optimization techniques, tracing their development from early duality-based methods pioneered by Dantzig, Wolfe, and Benders in the 1960s to the emergence of the Augmented Lagrangian Alternating Direction Inexact Newton (ALADIN) algorithm. The initial focus on Lagrangian relaxation for convex problems and decomposition strategies led to the refinement of methods like the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). The resurgence of interest in distributed optimization in the late 2000s, particularly in machine learning and imaging, demonstrated ADMM's practical efficacy and its unifying potential. This overview also highlights the emergence of the proximal center method and its applications in diverse domains. Furthermore, the paper underscores the distinctive features of ALADIN, which offers convergence guarantees for non-convex scenarios without introducing auxiliary variables, differentiating it from traditional augmentation techniques. In essence, this work encapsulates the historical trajectory of distributed optimization and underscores the promising prospects of ALADIN in addressing non-convex optimization challenges.

Transformer-based language models (TLMs) have widely been recognized to be a cutting-edge technology for the successful development of deep-learning-based solutions to problems and applications that require natural language processing and understanding. Like for other textual domains, TLMs have indeed pushed the state-of-the-art of AI approaches for many tasks of interest in the legal domain. Despite the first Transformer model being proposed about six years ago, there has been a rapid progress of this technology at an unprecedented rate, whereby BERT and related models represent a major reference, also in the legal domain. This article provides the first systematic overview of TLM-based methods for AI-driven problems and tasks in the legal sphere. A major goal is to highlight research advances in this field so as to understand, on the one hand, how the Transformers have contributed to the success of AI in supporting legal processes, and on the other hand, what are the current limitations and opportunities for further research development.