What may appear to be an image of Tacoma is, in fact, a simulated one, created by transferring visual patterns of Beijing onto a map of a real Tacoma neighborhood. A fire in Central Park seems to appear as a smoke plume and a line of flames in a satellite image. Colorful lights on Diwali night in India, seen from space, seem to show widespread fireworks activity. Both images exemplify what a new University of Washington-led study calls "location spoofing." The photos -- created by different people, for different purposes -- are fake but look like genuine images of real places. And with the more sophisticated AI technologies available today, researchers warn that such "deepfake geography" could become a growing problem.

The field of Weakly Supervised Learning (WSL) has recently seen a surge of popularity, with numerous papers addressing different types of "supervision deficiencies". In WSL use cases, a variety of situations exists where the collected "information" is imperfect. The paradigm of WSL attempts to list and cover these problems with associated solutions. In this paper, we review the research progress on WSL with the aim to make it as a brief introduction to this field. We present the three axis of WSL cube and an overview of most of all the elements of their facets. We propose three measurable quantities that acts as coordinates in the previously defined cube namely: Quality, Adaptability and Quantity of information. Thus we suggest that Biquality Learning framework can be defined as a plan of the WSL cube and propose to re-discover previously unrelated patches in WSL literature as a unified Biquality Learning literature.

Vulnerability detection has always been the most important task in the field of software security. With the development of technology, in the face of massive source code, automated analysis and detection of vulnerabilities has become a current research hotspot. For special text files such as source code, using some of the hottest NLP technologies to build models and realize the automatic analysis and detection of source code has become one of the most anticipated studies in the field of vulnerability detection. This article does a brief survey of some recent new documents and technologies, such as CodeBERT, and summarizes the previous technologies.

We develop a deep generative model built on a fully differentiable simulator for multi-agent trajectory prediction. Agents are modeled with conditional recurrent variational neural networks (CVRNNs), which take as input an ego-centric birdview image representing the current state of the world and output an action, consisting of steering and acceleration, which is used to derive the subsequent agent state using a kinematic bicycle model. The full simulation state is then differentiably rendered for each agent, initiating the next time step. We achieve state-of-the-art results on the INTERACTION dataset, using standard neural architectures and a standard variational training objective, producing realistic multi-modal predictions without any ad-hoc diversity-inducing losses. We conduct ablation studies to examine individual components of the simulator, finding that both the kinematic bicycle model and the continuous feedback from the birdview image are crucial for achieving this level of performance. We name our model ITRA, for "Imagining the Road Ahead".

Researchers from all over the world contribute to this repository as a prelude to the peer review process for publication in traditional journals. The articles listed below represent a small fraction of all articles appearing on the preprint server. They are listed in no particular order with a link to each paper along with a brief overview. Links to GitHub repos are provided when available. Especially relevant articles are marked with a "thumbs up" icon.

Federated learning (FL) brings collaborative intelligence into industries without centralized training data to accelerate the process of Industry 4.0 on the edge computing level. FL solves the dilemma in which enterprises wish to make the use of data intelligence with security concerns. To accelerate industrial Internet of things with the further leverage of FL, existing achievements on FL are developed from three aspects: 1) define terminologies and elaborate a general framework of FL for accommodating various scenarios; 2) discuss the state-of-the-art of FL on fundamental researches including data partitioning, privacy preservation, model optimization, local model transportation, personalization, motivation mechanism, platform & tools, and benchmark; 3) discuss the impacts of FL from the economic perspective. To attract more attention from industrial academia and practice, a FL-transformed manufacturing paradigm is presented, and future research directions of FL are given and possible immediate applications in Industry 4.0 domain are also proposed.

Portfolio methods represent a simple but efficient type of action abstraction which has shown to improve the performance of search-based agents in a range of strategy games. We first review existing portfolio techniques and propose a new algorithm for optimization and action-selection based on the Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithm. Moreover, a series of variants are developed to solve problems in different aspects. We further analyze the performance of discussed agents in a general strategy game-playing task. For this purpose, we run experiments on three different game-modes of the Stratega framework. For the optimization of the agents' parameters and portfolio sets we study the use of the N-tuple Bandit Evolutionary Algorithm. The resulting portfolio sets suggest a high diversity in play-styles while being able to consistently beat the sample agents. An analysis of the agents' performance shows that the proposed algorithm generalizes well to all game-modes and is able to outperform other portfolio methods.

Spoken dialogue is the most natural way for people to interact with complex autonomous agents such as robots. Future Army operational environments will require technology that allows artificial intelligent agents to understand and carry out commands and interact with them as teammates. Researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory and the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, a Department of Defense-sponsored University Affiliated Research Center, created an approach to flexibly interpret and respond to Soldier intent derived from spoken dialogue with autonomous systems. This technology is currently the primary component for dialogue processing for the lab's Joint Understanding and Dialogue Interface, or JUDI, system, a prototype that enables bi-directional conversational interactions between Soldiers and autonomous systems. "We employed a statistical classification technique for enabling conversational AI using state-of-the-art natural language understanding and dialogue management technologies," said Army researcher Dr. Felix Gervits. "The statistical language classifier enables autonomous systems to interpret the intent of a Soldier by recognizing the purpose of the communication and performing actions to realize the underlying intent."

Since the depletion of fossil fuels, the world has started to rely heavily on renewable sources of energy. With every passing year, our dependency on the renewable sources of energy is increasing exponentially. As a result, complex and hybrid generation systems are being designed and developed to meet the energy demands and ensure energy security in a country. The continual improvement in the technology and an effort towards the provision of uninterrupted power to the end-users is strongly dependent on an effective and fault resilient Operation and Maintenance (O&M) system. Ingenious algorithms and techniques are hence been introduced aiming to minimize equipment and plant downtime. Efforts are being made to develop robust Prognostic Maintenance systems that can identify the faults before they occur. To this aim, complex Data Analytics and Machine Learning (ML) techniques are being used to increase the overall efficiency of these prognostic maintenance systems. This paper provides an overview of the predictive/prognostic maintenance frameworks reported in the literature. We pay a particular focus to the approaches, challenges including data-related issues, such as the availability and quality of the data and data auditing, feature engineering, interpretability, and security issues. Being a key aspect of ML-based solutions, we also discuss some of the commonly used publicly available datasets in the domain. The paper also identifies key future research directions. We believe such detailed analysis will provide a baseline for future research in the domain.

Top-k recommendation seeks to deliver a personalized list of k items to each individual user. An established methodology in the literature based on matrix factorization (MF), which usually represents users and items as vectors in low-dimensional space, is an effective approach to recommender systems, thanks to its superior performance in terms of recommendation quality and scalability. A typical matrix factorization recommender system has two main phases: preference elicitation and recommendation retrieval. The former analyzes user-generated data to learn user preferences and item characteristics in the form of latent feature vectors, whereas the latter ranks the candidate items based on the learnt vectors and returns the top-k items from the ranked list. For preference elicitation, there have been numerous works to build accurate MF-based recommendation algorithms that can learn from large datasets. However, for the recommendation retrieval phase, naively scanning a large number of items to identify the few most relevant ones may inhibit truly real-time applications. In this work, we survey recent advances and state-of-the-art approaches in the literature that enable fast and accurate retrieval for MF-based personalized recommendations. Also, we include analytical discussions of approaches along different dimensions to provide the readers with a more comprehensive understanding of the surveyed works.