We present the SAMER Corpus, the first manually annotated Arabic parallel corpus for text simplification targeting school-aged learners. Our corpus comprises texts of 159K words selected from 15 publicly available Arabic fiction novels most of which were published between 1865 and 1955. Our corpus includes readability level annotations at both the document and word levels, as well as two simplified parallel versions for each text targeting learners at two different readability levels. We describe the corpus selection process, and outline the guidelines we followed to create the annotations and ensure their quality. Our corpus is publicly available to support and encourage research on Arabic text simplification, Arabic automatic readability assessment, and the development of Arabic pedagogical language technologies.

Perception is an essential component of pipelines in field robotics. In this survey, we quantitatively compare publicly available datasets available in unstructured outdoor environments. We focus on datasets for common perception tasks in field robotics. Our survey categorizes and compares available research datasets. This survey also reports on relevant dataset characteristics to help practitioners determine which dataset fits best for their own application. We believe more consideration should be taken in choosing compatible annotation policies across the datasets in unstructured outdoor environments.

The integration of Foundation Models (FMs) with Federated Learning (FL) presents a transformative paradigm in Artificial Intelligence (AI), offering enhanced capabilities while addressing concerns of privacy, data decentralization, and computational efficiency. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the emerging field of Federated Foundation Models (FedFM), elucidating their synergistic relationship and exploring novel methodologies, challenges, and future directions that the FL research field needs to focus on in order to thrive in the age of foundation models. A systematic multi-tiered taxonomy is proposed, categorizing existing FedFM approaches for model training, aggregation, trustworthiness, and incentivization. Key challenges, including how to enable FL to deal with high complexity of computational demands, privacy considerations, contribution evaluation, and communication efficiency, are thoroughly discussed. Moreover, the paper explores the intricate challenges of communication, scalability and security inherent in training/fine-tuning FMs via FL, highlighting the potential of quantum computing to revolutionize the training, inference, optimization and data encryption processes. This survey underscores the importance of further research to propel innovation in FedFM, emphasizing the need for developing trustworthy solutions. It serves as a foundational guide for researchers and practitioners interested in contributing to this interdisciplinary and rapidly advancing field.

In this chapter, readers will explore how machine learning has been applied to build malware detection systems designed for the Windows operating system. This chapter starts by introducing the main components of a Machine Learning pipeline, highlighting the challenges of collecting and maintaining up-to-date datasets. Following this introduction, various state-of-the-art malware detectors are presented, encompassing both feature-based and deep learning-based detectors. Subsequent sections introduce the primary challenges encountered by machine learning-based malware detectors, including concept drift and adversarial attacks. Lastly, this chapter concludes by providing a brief overview of the ongoing research on adversarial defenses.

The generative AI technology offers an increasing variety of tools for generating entirely synthetic images that are increasingly indistinguishable from real ones. Unlike methods that alter portions of an image, the creation of completely synthetic images presents a unique challenge and several Synthetic Image Detection (SID) methods have recently appeared to tackle it. Yet, there is often a large gap between experimental results on benchmark datasets and the performance of methods in the wild. To better address the evaluation needs of SID and help close this gap, this paper introduces a benchmarking framework that integrates several state-of-the-art SID models. Our selection of integrated models was based on the utilization of varied input features, and different network architectures, aiming to encompass a broad spectrum of techniques. The framework leverages recent datasets with a diverse set of generative models, high level of photo-realism and resolution, reflecting the rapid improvements in image synthesis technology. Additionally, the framework enables the study of how image transformations, common in assets shared online, such as JPEG compression, affect detection performance. SIDBench is available on https://github.com/mever-team/sidbench and is designed in a modular manner to enable easy inclusion of new datasets and SID models.

The idea of using deep-learning-based molecular generation to accelerate discovery of drug candidates has attracted extraordinary attention, and many deep generative models have been developed for automated drug design, termed molecular generation. In general, molecular generation encompasses two main strategies: de novo design, which generates novel molecular structures from scratch, and lead optimization, which refines existing molecules into drug candidates. Among them, lead optimization plays an important role in real-world drug design. For example, it can enable the development of me-better drugs that are chemically distinct yet more effective than the original drugs. It can also facilitate fragment-based drug design, transforming virtual-screened small ligands with low affinity into first-in-class medicines. Despite its importance, automated lead optimization remains underexplored compared to the well-established de novo generative models, due to its reliance on complex biological and chemical knowledge. To bridge this gap, we conduct a systematic review of traditional computational methods for lead optimization, organizing these strategies into four principal sub-tasks with defined inputs and outputs. This review delves into the basic concepts, goals, conventional CADD techniques, and recent advancements in AIDD. Additionally, we introduce a unified perspective based on constrained subgraph generation to harmonize the methodologies of de novo design and lead optimization. Through this lens, de novo design can incorporate strategies from lead optimization to address the challenge of generating hard-to-synthesize molecules; inversely, lead optimization can benefit from the innovations in de novo design by approaching it as a task of generating molecules conditioned on certain substructures.

The networking field is characterized by its high complexity and rapid iteration, requiring extensive expertise to accomplish network tasks, ranging from network design, configuration, diagnosis and security. The inherent complexity of these tasks, coupled with the ever-changing landscape of networking technologies and protocols, poses significant hurdles for traditional machine learning-based methods. These methods often struggle to generalize and automate complex tasks in networking, as they require extensive labeled data, domain-specific feature engineering, and frequent retraining to adapt to new scenarios. However, the recent emergence of large language models (LLMs) has sparked a new wave of possibilities in addressing these challenges. LLMs have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding, generation, and reasoning. These models, trained on extensive data, can benefit the networking domain. Some efforts have already explored the application of LLMs in the networking domain and revealed promising results. By reviewing recent advances, we present an abstract workflow to describe the fundamental process involved in applying LLM for Networking. We introduce the highlights of existing works by category and explain in detail how they operate at different stages of the workflow. Furthermore, we delve into the challenges encountered, discuss potential solutions, and outline future research prospects. We hope that this survey will provide insight for researchers and practitioners, promoting the development of this interdisciplinary research field.

Massive multiple input multiple output (M-MIMO) technology plays a pivotal role in fifth-generation (5G) and beyond communication systems, offering a wide range of benefits, from increased spectral efficiency (SE) to enhanced energy efficiency and higher reliability. However, these advantages are contingent upon precise channel state information (CSI) availability at the base station (BS). Ensuring precise CSI is challenging due to the constrained size of the coherence interval and the resulting limitations on pilot sequence length. Therefore, reusing pilot sequences in adjacent cells introduces pilot contamination, hindering SE enhancement. This paper reviews recent advancements and addresses research challenges in mitigating pilot contamination and improving channel estimation, categorizing the existing research into three broader categories: pilot assignment schemes, advanced signal processing methods, and advanced channel estimation techniques. Salient representative pilot mitigation/assignment techniques are analyzed and compared in each category. Lastly, possible future research directions are discussed.

As technology advances, the use of Machine Learning (ML) in cybersecurity is becoming increasingly crucial to tackle the growing complexity of cyber threats. While traditional ML models can enhance cybersecurity, their high energy and resource demands limit their applications, leading to the emergence of Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) as a more suitable solution for resource-constrained environments. TinyML is widely applied in areas such as smart homes, healthcare, and industrial automation. TinyML focuses on optimizing ML algorithms for small, low-power devices, enabling intelligent data processing directly on edge devices. This paper provides a comprehensive review of common challenges of TinyML techniques, such as power consumption, limited memory, and computational constraints; it also explores potential solutions to these challenges, such as energy harvesting, computational optimization techniques, and transfer learning for privacy preservation. On the other hand, this paper discusses TinyML's applications in advancing cybersecurity for Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructures (EVCIs) as a representative use case. It presents an experimental case study that enhances cybersecurity in EVCI using TinyML, evaluated against traditional ML in terms of reduced delay and memory usage, with a slight trade-off in accuracy. Additionally, the study includes a practical setup using the ESP32 microcontroller in the PlatformIO environment, which provides a hands-on assessment of TinyML's application in cybersecurity for EVCI.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are large datasets with specific structures representing large knowledge bases (KB) where each node represents a key entity and relations amongst them are typed edges. Natural language queries formed to extract information from a KB entail starting from specific nodes and reasoning over multiple edges of the corresponding KG to arrive at the correct set of answer nodes. Traditional approaches of question answering on KG are based on (a) semantic parsing (SP), where a logical form (e.g., S-expression, SPARQL query, etc.) is generated using node and edge embeddings and then reasoning over these representations or tuning language models to generate the final answer directly, or (b) information-retrieval based that works by extracting entities and relations sequentially. In this work, we evaluate the capability of (LLMs) to answer questions over KG that involve multiple hops. We show that depending upon the size and nature of the KG we need different approaches to extract and feed the relevant information to an LLM since every LLM comes with a fixed context window. We evaluate our approach on six KGs with and without the availability of example-specific sub-graphs and show that both the IR and SP-based methods can be adopted by LLMs resulting in an extremely competitive performance.