Association rule mining is intended for searching for the relationships between attributes in transaction databases. The whole process of rule discovery is very complex, and involves pre-processing techniques, a rule mining step, and post-processing, in which visualization is carried out. Visualization of discovered association rules is an essential step within the whole association rule mining pipeline, to enhance the understanding of users on the results of rule mining. Several association rule mining and visualization methods have been developed during the past decades. This review paper aims to create a literature review, identify the main techniques published in peer-reviewed literature, examine each method's main features, and present the main applications in the field. Defining the future steps of this research area is another goal of this review paper.

Responsibility attribution is a key concept of accountable multi-agent decision making. Given a sequence of actions, responsibility attribution mechanisms quantify the impact of each participating agent to the final outcome. One such popular mechanism is based on actual causality, and it assigns (causal) responsibility based on the actions that were found to be pivotal for the considered outcome. However, the inherent problem of pinpointing actual causes and consequently determining the exact responsibility assignment has shown to be computationally intractable. In this paper, we aim to provide a practical algorithmic solution to the problem of responsibility attribution under a computational budget. We first formalize the problem in the framework of Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (Dec-POMDPs) augmented by a specific class of Structural Causal Models (SCMs). Under this framework, we introduce a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) type of method which efficiently approximates the agents' degrees of responsibility. This method utilizes the structure of a novel search tree and a pruning technique, both tailored to the problem of responsibility attribution. Other novel components of our method are (a) a child selection policy based on linear scalarization and (b) a backpropagation procedure that accounts for a minimality condition that is typically used to define actual causality. We experimentally evaluate the efficacy of our algorithm through a simulation-based test-bed, which includes three team-based card games.

Research on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based production scheduling (PS) has gained a lot of attention in recent years, primarily due to the high demand for optimizing scheduling problems in diverse industry settings. Numerous studies are carried out and published as stand-alone experiments that often vary only slightly with respect to problem setups and solution approaches. The programmatic core of these experiments is typically very similar. Despite this fact, no standardized and resilient framework for experimentation on PS problems with DRL algorithms could be established so far. In this paper, we introduce schlably, a Python-based framework that provides researchers a comprehensive toolset to facilitate the development of PS solution strategies based on DRL. schlably eliminates the redundant overhead work that the creation of a sturdy and flexible backbone requires and increases the comparability and reusability of conducted research work.

Nowadays, the behavior tree is gaining popularity as a representation for robot tasks due to its modularity and reusability. Designing behavior-tree tasks manually is time-consuming for robot end-users, thus there is a need for investigating automatic behavior-tree-based task generation. Prior behavior-tree-based task generation approaches focus on fixed primitive tasks and lack generalizability to new task domains. To cope with this issue, we propose a novel behavior-tree-based task generation approach that utilizes state-of-the-art large language models. We propose a Phase-Step prompt design that enables a hierarchical-structured robot task generation and further integrate it with behavior-tree-embedding-based search to set up the appropriate prompt. In this way, we enable an automatic and cross-domain behavior-tree task generation. Our behavior-tree-based task generation approach does not require a set of pre-defined primitive tasks. End-users only need to describe an abstract desired task and our proposed approach can swiftly generate the corresponding behavior tree. A full-process case study is provided to demonstrate our proposed approach. An ablation study is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of our Phase-Step prompts. Assessment on Phase-Step prompts and the limitation of large language models are presented and discussed.

Graphs can model complex relationships between objects, enabling a myriad of Web applications such as online page/article classification and social recommendation. While graph neural networks(GNNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for graph representation learning, in an end-to-end supervised setting, their performance heavily rely on a large amount of task-specific supervision. To reduce labeling requirement, the "pre-train, fine-tune" and "pre-train, prompt" paradigms have become increasingly common. In particular, prompting is a popular alternative to fine-tuning in natural language processing, which is designed to narrow the gap between pre-training and downstream objectives in a task-specific manner. However, existing study of prompting on graphs is still limited, lacking a universal treatment to appeal to different downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose GraphPrompt, a novel pre-training and prompting framework on graphs. GraphPrompt not only unifies pre-training and downstream tasks into a common task template, but also employs a learnable prompt to assist a downstream task in locating the most relevant knowledge from the pre-train model in a task-specific manner. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on five public datasets to evaluate and analyze GraphPrompt.

Since their proposal in the 2014 paper by Ian Goodfellow, there has been an explosion of research into the area of Generative Adversarial Networks. While they have been utilised in many fields, the realm of malware research is a problem space in which GANs have taken root. From balancing datasets to creating unseen examples in rare classes, GAN models offer extensive opportunities for application. This paper surveys the current research and literature for the use of Generative Adversarial Networks in the malware problem space. This is done with the hope that the reader may be able to gain an overall understanding as to what the Generative Adversarial model provides for this field, and for what areas within malware research it is best utilised. It covers the current related surveys, the different categories of GAN, and gives the outcomes of recent research into optimising GANs for different topics, as well as future directions for exploration.

Reproducibility is one of the core dimensions that concur to deliver Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence. Broadly speaking, reproducibility can be defined as the possibility to reproduce the same or a similar experiment or method, thereby obtaining the same or similar results as the original scientists. It is an essential ingredient of the scientific method and crucial for gaining trust in relevant claims. A reproducibility crisis has been recently acknowledged by scientists and this seems to affect even more Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, due to the complexity of the models at the core of their recent successes. Notwithstanding the recent debate on Artificial Intelligence reproducibility, its practical implementation is still insufficient, also because many technical issues are overlooked. In this survey, we critically review the current literature on the topic and highlight the open issues. Our contribution is three-fold. We propose a concise terminological review of the terms coming into play. We collect and systematize existing recommendations for achieving reproducibility, putting forth the means to comply with them. We identify key elements often overlooked in modern Machine Learning and provide novel recommendations for them. We further specialize these for two critical application domains, namely the biomedical and physical artificial intelligence fields.

Dimensionality reduction (DR) plays a vital role in the visual analysis of high-dimensional data. One main aim of DR is to reveal hidden patterns that lie on intrinsic low-dimensional manifolds. However, DR often overlooks important patterns when the manifolds are distorted or masked by certain influential data attributes. This paper presents a feature learning framework, FEALM, designed to generate a set of optimized data projections for nonlinear DR in order to capture important patterns in the hidden manifolds. These projections produce maximally different nearest-neighbor graphs so that resultant DR outcomes are significantly different. To achieve such a capability, we design an optimization algorithm as well as introduce a new graph dissimilarity measure, named neighbor-shape dissimilarity. Additionally, we develop interactive visualizations to assist comparison of obtained DR results and interpretation of each DR result. We demonstrate FEALM's effectiveness through experiments and case studies using synthetic and real-world datasets.

Geometric Deep Learning is a term for approaches considering ML problems from the perspectives of symmetry and invariance. It provides a common blueprint for CNNs, GNNs, and Transformers. Here, we study the history of GDL from ancient Greek geometry to Graph Neural Networks.

The recent progress in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) technology has significantly advanced UAV-based applications for military, civil, and commercial domains. Nevertheless, the challenges of establishing high-speed communication links, flexible control strategies, and developing efficient collaborative decision-making algorithms for a swarm of UAVs limit their autonomy, robustness, and reliability. Thus, a growing focus has been witnessed on collaborative communication to allow a swarm of UAVs to coordinate and communicate autonomously for the cooperative completion of tasks in a short time with improved efficiency and reliability. This work presents a comprehensive review of collaborative communication in a multi-UAV system. We thoroughly discuss the characteristics of intelligent UAVs and their communication and control requirements for autonomous collaboration and coordination. Moreover, we review various UAV collaboration tasks, summarize the applications of UAV swarm networks for dense urban environments and present the use case scenarios to highlight the current developments of UAV-based applications in various domains. Finally, we identify several exciting future research direction that needs attention for advancing the research in collaborative UAVs.