Diffusion models, a family of generative models based on deep learning, have become increasingly prominent in cutting-edge machine learning research. With a distinguished performance in generating samples that resemble the observed data, diffusion models are widely used in image, video, and text synthesis nowadays. In recent years, the concept of diffusion has been extended to time series applications, and many powerful models have been developed. Considering the deficiency of a methodical summary and discourse on these models, we provide this survey as an elementary resource for new researchers in this area and also an inspiration to motivate future research. For better understanding, we include an introduction about the basics of diffusion models. Except for this, we primarily focus on diffusion-based methods for time series forecasting, imputation, and generation, and present them respectively in three individual sections. We also compare different methods for the same application and highlight their connections if applicable. Lastly, we conclude the common limitation of diffusion-based methods and highlight potential future research directions.

The proliferation of machine learning (ML) has drawn unprecedented interest in the study of various multimedia contents such as text, image, audio and video, among others. Consequently, understanding and learning ML-based representations have taken center stage in knowledge discovery in intelligent multimedia research and applications. Nevertheless, the black-box nature of contemporary ML, especially in deep neural networks (DNNs), has posed a primary challenge for ML-based representation learning. To address this black-box problem, the studies on interpretability of ML have attracted tremendous interests in recent years. This paper presents a survey on recent advances and future prospects on interpretability of ML, with several application examples pertinent to multimedia computing, including text-image cross-modal representation learning, face recognition, and the recognition of objects. It is evidently shown that the study of interpretability of ML promises an important research direction, one which is worth further investment in.

The automation of this field supported the development of novel Deep Learning (DL) [62] architectures, especially Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) [61], that competed with previous state-of-the-art handcrafted models. Since the introduction of CNNs with LeNet [61] and the beginning of Deep Learning with AlexNet [60], most improvements in the field (e.g., deepening the architecture or adding residual connections) were driven by empiricism. NAS aims to put an end to this trial-and-error practice and bring a formal way to smoothen the progress in deep learning architecture design. Moreover, automatically discovering more efficient architectures is particularly relevant in the ecological transition context (i.e., green Deep Learning [119]). The role of manual feature engineering and model development has gradually decreased ever since.

Applications of Reinforcement Learning in the Finance Technology (Fintech) have acquired a lot of admiration lately. Undoubtedly Reinforcement Learning, through its vast competence and proficiency, has aided remarkable results in the field of Fintech. The objective of this systematic survey is to perform an exploratory study on a correlation between reinforcement learning and Fintech to highlight the prediction accuracy, complexity, scalability, risks, profitability and performance. Major uses of reinforcement learning in finance or Fintech include portfolio optimization, credit risk reduction, investment capital management, profit maximization, effective recommendation systems, and better price setting strategies. Several studies have addressed the actual contribution of reinforcement learning to the performance of financial institutions. The latest studies included in this survey are publications from 2018 onward. The survey is conducted using PRISMA technique which focuses on the reporting of reviews and is based on a checklist and four-phase flow diagram. The conducted survey indicates that the performance of RL-based strategies in Fintech fields proves to perform considerably better than other state-of-the-art algorithms. The present work discusses the use of reinforcement learning algorithms in diverse decision-making challenges in Fintech and concludes that the organizations dealing with finance can benefit greatly from Robo-advising, smart order channelling, market making, hedging and options pricing, portfolio optimization, and optimal execution.

Genetic Algorithm (GA) is a popular meta-heuristic evolutionary algorithm that uses stochastic operators to find optimal solution and has proved its effectiveness in solving many complex optimization problems (such as classification, optimization, and scheduling). However, despite its performance, popularity and simplicity, not much attention has been paid towards reproducibility and reusability of GA. In this paper, we have extended Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data principles to enable the reproducibility and reusability of algorithms. We have chosen GA as a usecase to the demonstrate the applicability of the proposed principles. Also we have presented an overview of methodological developments and variants of GA that makes it challenging to reproduce or even find the right source. Additionally, to enable FAIR algorithms, we propose a vocabulary (i.e. $evo$) using light weight RDF format, facilitating the reproducibility. Given the stochastic nature of GAs, this work can be extended to numerous Optimization and machine learning algorithms/methods.

It has been well-established that within conventional neural networks, many of the values produced at each layer are zero. In this work, I demonstrate that spiking neural networks can prevent the transmission of spikes representing values close to zero using local information. This can reduce the amount of energy required for communication and computation in these networks while preserving accuracy. Additionally, this demonstrates a novel application of biologically observed spiking rhythms.

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is the task of automatically detecting and correcting errors in text. The task not only includes the correction of grammatical errors, such as missing prepositions and mismatched subject-verb agreement, but also orthographic and semantic errors, such as misspellings and word choice errors respectively. The field has seen significant progress in the last decade, motivated in part by a series of five shared tasks, which drove the development of rule-based methods, statistical classifiers, statistical machine translation, and finally neural machine translation systems which represent the current dominant state of the art. In this survey paper, we condense the field into a single article and first outline some of the linguistic challenges of the task, introduce the most popular datasets that are available to researchers (for both English and other languages), and summarise the various methods and techniques that have been developed with a particular focus on artificial error generation. We next describe the many different approaches to evaluation as well as concerns surrounding metric reliability, especially in relation to subjective human judgements, before concluding with an overview of recent progress and suggestions for future work and remaining challenges. We hope that this survey will serve as comprehensive resource for researchers who are new to the field or who want to be kept apprised of recent developments.

Machine Learning (ML) is of increasing interest for modeling parametric effects in manufacturing processes. But this approach is limited to established processes for which a deep physics-based understanding has been developed over time, since state-of-the-art approaches focus on reducing the experimental and/or computational costs of generating the training data but ignore the inherent and significant cost of developing qualitatively accurate physics-based models for new processes . This paper proposes a transfer learning based approach to address this issue, in which a ML model is trained on a large amount of computationally inexpensive data from a physics-based process model (source) and then fine-tuned on a smaller amount of costly experimental data (target). The novelty lies in pushing the boundaries of the qualitative accuracy demanded of the source model, which is assumed to be high in the literature, and is the root of the high model development cost. Our approach is evaluated for modeling the printed line width in Fused Filament Fabrication. Despite extreme functional and quantitative inaccuracies in the source our approach reduces the model development cost by years, experimental cost by 56-76%, computational cost by orders of magnitude, and prediction error by 16-24%.

Resistive random-access memory (RRAM) is a promising candidate for next-generation memory devices due to its high speed, low power consumption, and excellent scalability. Metal oxides are commonly used as the oxide layer in RRAM devices due to their high dielectric constant and stability. However, to further improve the performance of RRAM devices, recent research has focused on integrating artificial intelligence (AI). AI can be used to optimize the performance of RRAM devices, while RRAM can also power AI as a hardware accelerator and in neuromorphic computing. This review paper provides an overview of the combination of metal oxides-based RRAM and AI, highlighting recent advances in these two directions. We discuss the use of AI to improve the performance of RRAM devices and the use of RRAM to power AI. Additionally, we address key challenges in the field and provide insights into future research directions

Large language models show impressive results at predicting structured text such as code, but also commonly introduce errors and hallucinations in their output. When used to assist software developers, these models may make mistakes that users must go back and fix, or worse, introduce subtle bugs that users may miss entirely. We propose Randomized Utility-driven Synthesis of Uncertain REgions (R-U-SURE), an approach for building uncertainty-aware suggestions based on a decision-theoretic model of goal-conditioned utility, using random samples from a generative model as a proxy for the unobserved possible intents of the end user. Our technique combines minimum-Bayes-risk decoding, dual decomposition, and decision diagrams in order to efficiently produce structured uncertainty summaries, given only sample access to an arbitrary generative model of code and an optional AST parser. We demonstrate R-U-SURE on three developer-assistance tasks, and show that it can be applied different user interaction patterns without retraining the model and leads to more accurate uncertainty estimates than token-probability baselines. We also release our implementation as an open-source library at https://github.com/google-research/r_u_sure.