The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened up new opportunities for leveraging artificial intelligence in various domains, including cybersecurity. As the volume and sophistication of cyber threats continue to grow, there is an increasing need for intelligent systems that can automatically detect vulnerabilities, analyze malware, and respond to attacks. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of the literature on the application of LLMs in cybersecurity (LLM4Security). By comprehensively collecting over 30K relevant papers and systematically analyzing 127 papers from top security and software engineering venues, we aim to provide a holistic view of how LLMs are being used to solve diverse problems across the cybersecurity domain. Through our analysis, we identify several key findings. First, we observe that LLMs are being applied to a wide range of cybersecurity tasks, including vulnerability detection, malware analysis, network intrusion detection, and phishing detection. Second, we find that the datasets used for training and evaluating LLMs in these tasks are often limited in size and diversity, highlighting the need for more comprehensive and representative datasets. Third, we identify several promising techniques for adapting LLMs to specific cybersecurity domains, such as fine-tuning, transfer learning, and domain-specific pre-training. Finally, we discuss the main challenges and opportunities for future research in LLM4Security, including the need for more interpretable and explainable models, the importance of addressing data privacy and security concerns, and the potential for leveraging LLMs for proactive defense and threat hunting. Overall, our survey provides a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art in LLM4Security and identifies several promising directions for future research.

In the vast domain of cybersecurity, the transition from reactive defense to offensive has become critical in protecting digital infrastructures. This paper explores the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into offensive cybersecurity, particularly through the development of an autonomous AI agent, ReaperAI, designed to simulate and execute cyberattacks. Leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, ReaperAI demonstrates the potential to identify, exploit, and analyze security vulnerabilities autonomously. This research outlines the core methodologies that can be utilized to increase consistency and performance, including task-driven penetration testing frameworks, AI-driven command generation, and advanced prompting techniques. The AI agent operates within a structured environment using Python, enhanced by Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for contextual understanding and memory retention. ReaperAI was tested on platforms including, Hack The Box, where it successfully exploited known vulnerabilities, demonstrating its potential power. However, the deployment of AI in offensive security presents significant ethical and operational challenges. The agent's development process revealed complexities in command execution, error handling, and maintaining ethical constraints, highlighting areas for future enhancement. This study contributes to the discussion on AI's role in cybersecurity by showcasing how AI can augment offensive security strategies. It also proposes future research directions, including the refinement of AI interactions with cybersecurity tools, enhancement of learning mechanisms, and the discussion of ethical guidelines for AI in offensive roles. The findings advocate for a unique approach to AI implementation in cybersecurity, emphasizing innovation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become capable of generating highly fluent text in certain languages, without modules specially designed to capture grammar or semantic coherence. What does this mean for the future of linguistic expertise in NLP? We highlight several aspects in which NLP (still) relies on linguistics, or where linguistic thinking can illuminate new directions. We argue our case around the acronym $RELIES$ that encapsulates six major facets where linguistics contributes to NLP: $R$esources, $E$valuation, $L$ow-resource settings, $I$nterpretability, $E$xplanation, and the $S$tudy of language. This list is not exhaustive, nor is linguistics the main point of reference for every effort under these themes; but at a macro level, these facets highlight the enduring importance of studying machine systems vis-a-vis systems of human language.

Real-world graphs are complex to process for performing effective analysis, such as anomaly detection. However, recently, there have been several research efforts addressing the issues surrounding graph-based anomaly detection. In this paper, we discuss a comprehensive overview of anomaly detection techniques on graph data. We also discuss the various application domains which use those anomaly detection techniques. We present a new taxonomy that categorizes the different state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods based on assumptions and techniques. Within each category, we discuss the fundamental research ideas that have been done to improve anomaly detection. We further discuss the advantages and disadvantages of current anomaly detection techniques. Finally, we present potential future research directions in anomaly detection on graph-structured data.

Action recognition is a key technology in building interactive metaverses. With the rapid development of deep learning, methods in action recognition have also achieved great advancement. Researchers design and implement the backbones referring to multiple standpoints, which leads to the diversity of methods and encountering new challenges. This paper reviews several action recognition methods based on deep neural networks. We introduce these methods in three parts: 1) Two-Streams networks and their variants, which, specifically in this paper, use RGB video frame and optical flow modality as input; 2) 3D convolutional networks, which make efforts in taking advantage of RGB modality directly while extracting different motion information is no longer necessary; 3) Transformer-based methods, which introduce the model from natural language processing into computer vision and video understanding. We offer objective sights in this review and hopefully provide a reference for future research.

The increasing reliance on Deep Learning models, combined with their inherent lack of transparency, has spurred the development of a novel field of study known as eXplainable AI (XAI) methods. These methods seek to enhance the trust of end-users in automated systems by providing insights into the rationale behind their decisions. This paper presents a novel approach for measuring user trust in XAI systems, allowing their refinement. Our proposed metric combines both performance metrics and trust indicators from an objective perspective. To validate this novel methodology, we conducted a case study in a realistic medical scenario: the usage of XAI system for the detection of pneumonia from x-ray images.

The scientific study of the Solar System's minor bodies ultimately starts with a search for those bodies. This chapter presents a review of the use of machine learning techniques to find moving objects, both natural and artificial, in astronomical imagery. After a short review of the classical non-machine learning techniques that are historically used, I review the relatively nascent machine learning literature, which can broadly be summarized into three categories: streak detection, detection of moving point sources in image sequences, and detection of moving sources in shift and stack searches. In most cases, convolutional neural networks are utilized, which is the obvious choice given the imagery nature of the inputs. In this chapter I present two example networks: a Residual Network I designed which is in use in various shift and stack searches, and a convolutional neural network that was designed for prediction of source brightnesses and their uncertainties in those same shift-stacks. In discussion of the literature and example networks, I discuss various pitfalls with the use of machine learning techniques, including a discussion on the important issue of overfitting. I discuss various pitfall associated with the use of machine learning techniques, and what I consider best practices to follow in the application of machine learning to a new problem, including methods for the creation of robust training sets, validation, and training to avoid overfitting.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely used in many artificial intelligence (AI) tasks. However, deploying them brings significant challenges due to the huge cost of memory, energy, and computation. To address these challenges, researchers have developed various model compression techniques such as model quantization and model pruning. Recently, there has been a surge in research of compression methods to achieve model efficiency while retaining the performance. Furthermore, more and more works focus on customizing the DNN hardware accelerators to better leverage the model compression techniques. In addition to efficiency, preserving security and privacy is critical for deploying DNNs. However, the vast and diverse body of related works can be overwhelming. This inspires us to conduct a comprehensive survey on recent research toward the goal of high-performance, cost-efficient, and safe deployment of DNNs. Our survey first covers the mainstream model compression techniques such as model quantization, model pruning, knowledge distillation, and optimizations of non-linear operations. We then introduce recent advances in designing hardware accelerators that can adapt to efficient model compression approaches. Additionally, we discuss how homomorphic encryption can be integrated to secure DNN deployment. Finally, we discuss several issues, such as hardware evaluation, generalization, and integration of various compression approaches. Overall, we aim to provide a big picture of efficient DNNs, from algorithm to hardware accelerators and security perspectives.

Deep learning (DL) has substantially enhanced natural language processing (NLP) in healthcare research. However, the increasing complexity of DL-based NLP necessitates transparent model interpretability, or at least explainability, for reliable decision-making. This work presents a thorough scoping review of explainable and interpretable DL in healthcare NLP. The term "eXplainable and Interpretable Artificial Intelligence" (XIAI) is introduced to distinguish XAI from IAI. Different models are further categorized based on their functionality (model-, input-, output-based) and scope (local, global). Our analysis shows that attention mechanisms are the most prevalent emerging IAI technique. The use of IAI is growing, distinguishing it from XAI. The major challenges identified are that most XIAI does not explore "global" modelling processes, the lack of best practices, and the lack of systematic evaluation and benchmarks. One important opportunity is to use attention mechanisms to enhance multi-modal XIAI for personalized medicine. Additionally, combining DL with causal logic holds promise. Our discussion encourages the integration of XIAI in Large Language Models (LLMs) and domain-specific smaller models. In conclusion, XIAI adoption in healthcare requires dedicated in-house expertise. Collaboration with domain experts, end-users, and policymakers can lead to ready-to-use XIAI methods across NLP and medical tasks. While challenges exist, XIAI techniques offer a valuable foundation for interpretable NLP algorithms in healthcare.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of deep structural causal models (DSCMs), particularly focusing on their ability to answer counterfactual queries using observational data within known causal structures. It delves into the characteristics of DSCMs by analyzing the hypotheses, guarantees, and applications inherent to the underlying deep learning components and structural causal models, fostering a finer understanding of their capabilities and limitations in addressing different counterfactual queries. Furthermore, it highlights the challenges and open questions in the field of deep structural causal modeling. It sets the stages for researchers to identify future work directions and for practitioners to get an overview in order to find out the most appropriate methods for their needs.