The recent strides in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have propelled the rise of TinyML, a paradigm enabling AI computations at the edge without dependence on cloud connections. While TinyML offers real-time data analysis and swift responses critical for diverse applications, its devices' intrinsic resource limitations expose them to security risks. This research delves into the adversarial vulnerabilities of AI models on resource-constrained embedded hardware, with a focus on Model Extraction and Evasion Attacks. Our findings reveal that adversarial attacks from powerful host machines could be transferred to smaller, less secure devices like ESP32 and Raspberry Pi. This illustrates that adversarial attacks could be extended to tiny devices, underscoring vulnerabilities, and emphasizing the necessity for reinforced security measures in TinyML deployments. This exploration enhances the comprehension of security challenges in TinyML and offers insights for safeguarding sensitive data and ensuring device dependability in AI-powered edge computing settings.

This tutorial provides a comprehensive survey of methods for fine-tuning diffusion models to optimize downstream reward functions. While diffusion models are widely known to provide excellent generative modeling capability, practical applications in domains such as biology require generating samples that maximize some desired metric (e.g., translation efficiency in RNA, docking score in molecules, stability in protein). In these cases, the diffusion model can be optimized not only to generate realistic samples but also to explicitly maximize the measure of interest. Such methods are based on concepts from reinforcement learning (RL). We explain the application of various RL algorithms, including PPO, differentiable optimization, reward-weighted MLE, value-weighted sampling, and path consistency learning, tailored specifically for fine-tuning diffusion models. We aim to explore fundamental aspects such as the strengths and limitations of different RL-based fine-tuning algorithms across various scenarios, the benefits of RL-based fine-tuning compared to non-RL-based approaches, and the formal objectives of RL-based fine-tuning (target distributions). Additionally, we aim to examine their connections with related topics such as classifier guidance, Gflownets, flow-based diffusion models, path integral control theory, and sampling from unnormalized distributions such as MCMC. The code of this tutorial is available at https://github.com/masa-ue/RLfinetuning_Diffusion_Bioseq

The rapid development of spatial transcriptomics (ST) technologies is revolutionizing our understanding of the spatial organization of biological tissues. Current ST methods, categorized into next-generation sequencing-based (seq-based) and fluorescence in situ hybridization-based (image-based) methods, offer innovative insights into the functional dynamics of biological tissues. However, these methods are limited by their cellular resolution and the quantity of genes they can detect. To address these limitations, we propose SpaDiT, a deep learning method that utilizes a diffusion generative model to integrate scRNA-seq and ST data for the prediction of undetected genes. By employing a Transformer-based diffusion model, SpaDiT not only accurately predicts unknown genes but also effectively generates the spatial structure of ST genes. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of SpaDiT through extensive experiments on both seq-based and image-based ST data. SpaDiT significantly contributes to ST gene prediction methods with its innovative approach. Compared to eight leading baseline methods, SpaDiT achieved state-of-the-art performance across multiple metrics, highlighting its substantial bioinformatics contribution.

Text summarization is a well-studied problem that deals with deriving insights from unstructured text consumed by humans, and it has found extensive business applications. However, many real-life tasks involve generating a series of actions to achieve specific goals, such as workflows, recipes, dialogs, and travel plans. We refer to them as planning-like (PL) tasks noting that the main commonality they share is control flow information. which may be partially specified. Their structure presents an opportunity to create more practical summaries to help users make quick decisions. We investigate this observation by introducing a novel plan summarization problem, presenting a dataset, and providing a baseline method for generating PL summaries. Using quantitative metrics and qualitative user studies to establish baselines, we evaluate the plan summaries from our method and large language models. We believe the novel problem and dataset can reinvigorate research in summarization, which some consider as a solved problem.

This study introduces an innovative application of Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (C-GAN) integrated with Stacked Hourglass Networks (SHGN) aimed at enhancing image segmentation, particularly in the challenging environment of medical imaging. We address the problem of overfitting, common in deep learning models applied to complex imaging datasets, by augmenting data through rotation and scaling. A hybrid loss function combining L1 and L2 reconstruction losses, enriched with adversarial training, is introduced to refine segmentation processes in intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) imaging. Our approach is unique in its capacity to accurately delineate distinct regions within medical images, such as tissue boundaries and vascular structures, without extensive reliance on domain-specific knowledge. The algorithm was evaluated using a standard medical image library, showing superior performance metrics compared to existing methods, thereby demonstrating its potential in enhancing automated medical diagnostics through deep learning

This study presents the first examination of the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to follow reasoning strategies that are used to guide Automated Theorem Provers (ATPs). We evaluate the performance of GPT4, GPT3.5 Turbo and Google's recent Gemini model on problems from a steamroller domain. In addition to determining accuracy we make use of the Natural Language Processing library spaCy to explore new methods of investigating LLM's reasoning capabilities. This led to one alarming result, the low correlation between correct reasoning and correct answers for any of the tested models. We found that the models' performance when using the ATP reasoning strategies was comparable to one-shot chain of thought and observe that attention to uncertainty in the accuracy results is critical when drawing conclusions about model performance. Consistent with previous speculation we confirm that LLMs have a preference for, and are best able to follow, bottom up reasoning processes. However, the reasoning strategies can still be beneficial for deriving small and relevant sets of formulas for external processing by a trusted inference engine.

With low-cost computing devices, improved sensor technology, and the proliferation of data-driven algorithms, we have more data than we know what to do with. In transportation, we are seeing a surge in spatiotemporal data collection. At the same time, concerns over user privacy have led to research on differential privacy in applied settings. In this paper, we look at some recent developments in differential privacy in the context of spatiotemporal data. Spatiotemporal data contain not only features about users but also the geographical locations of their frequent visits. Hence, the public release of such data carries extreme risks. To address the need for such data in research and inference without exposing private information, significant work has been proposed. This survey paper aims to summarize these efforts and provide a review of differential privacy mechanisms and related software. We also discuss related work in transportation where such mechanisms have been applied. Furthermore, we address the challenges in the deployment and mass adoption of differential privacy in transportation spatiotemporal data for downstream analyses.

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of AI-driven mini-grid solutions aimed at enhancing sustainable energy access. It emphasises the potential of mini-grids, which can operate independently or in conjunction with national power grids, to provide reliable and affordable electricity to remote communities. Given the inherent unpredictability of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, the necessity for accurate energy forecasting and management is discussed, highlighting the role of advanced AI techniques in forecasting energy supply and demand, optimising grid operations, and ensuring sustainable energy distribution. This paper reviews various forecasting models, including statistical methods, machine learning algorithms, and hybrid approaches, evaluating their effectiveness for both short-term and long-term predictions. Additionally, it explores public datasets and tools such as Prophet, NeuralProphet, and N-BEATS for model implementation and validation. The survey concludes with recommendations for future research, addressing challenges in model adaptation and optimisation for real-world applications.

Machine Learning (ML) is continuously permeating a growing amount of application domains. Generative AI such as Large Language Models (LLMs) also sees broad adoption to process multi-modal data such as text, images, audio, and video. While the trend is to use ever-larger datasets for training, managing this data efficiently has become a significant practical challenge in the industry-double as much data is certainly not double as good. Rather the opposite is important since getting an understanding of the inherent quality and diversity of the underlying data lakes is a growing challenge for application-specific ML as well as for fine-tuning foundation models. Furthermore, information retrieval (IR) from expanding data lakes is complicated by the temporal dimension inherent in time-series data which must be considered to determine its semantic value. This study focuses on the different semantic-aware techniques to extract embeddings from mono-modal, multi-modal, and cross-modal data to enhance IR capabilities in a growing data lake. Articles were collected to summarize information about the state-of-the-art techniques focusing on applications of embedding for three different categories of data modalities.

The interpretability of random forest (RF) models is a research topic of growing interest in the machine learning (ML) community. In the state of the art, RF is considered a powerful learning ensemble given its predictive performance, flexibility, and ease of use. Furthermore, the inner process of the RF model is understandable because it uses an intuitive and intelligible approach for building the RF decision tree ensemble. However, the RF resulting model is regarded as a "black box" because of its numerous deep decision trees. Gaining visibility over the entire process that induces the final decisions by exploring each decision tree is complicated, if not impossible. This complexity limits the acceptance and implementation of RF models in several fields of application. Several papers have tackled the interpretation of RF models. This paper aims to provide an extensive review of methods used in the literature to interpret RF resulting models. We have analyzed these methods and classified them based on different axes. Although this review is not exhaustive, it provides a taxonomy of various techniques that should guide users in choosing the most appropriate tools for interpreting RF models, depending on the interpretability aspects sought. It should also be valuable for researchers who aim to focus their work on the interpretability of RF or ML black boxes in general.