With growing concerns surrounding privacy and regulatory compliance, the concept of machine unlearning has gained prominence, aiming to selectively forget or erase specific learned information from a trained model. In response to this critical need, we introduce a novel approach called Attack-and-Reset for Unlearning (ARU). This algorithm leverages meticulously crafted adversarial noise to generate a parameter mask, effectively resetting certain parameters and rendering them unlearnable. ARU outperforms current state-of-the-art results on two facial machine-unlearning benchmark datasets, MUFAC and MUCAC. In particular, we present the steps involved in attacking and masking that strategically filter and re-initialize network parameters biased towards the forget set. Our work represents a significant advancement in rendering data unexploitable to deep learning models through parameter re-initialization, achieved by harnessing adversarial noise to craft a mask.

In the era of information proliferation, discerning the credibility of news content poses an ever-growing challenge. This paper introduces RELIANCE, a pioneering ensemble learning system designed for robust information and fake news credibility evaluation. Comprising five diverse base models, including Support Vector Machine (SVM), naive Bayes, logistic regression, random forest, and Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory Networks (BiLSTMs), RELIANCE employs an innovative approach to integrate their strengths, harnessing the collective intelligence of the ensemble for enhanced accuracy. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of RELIANCE over individual models, indicating its efficacy in distinguishing between credible and non-credible information sources. RELIANCE, also surpasses baseline models in information and news credibility assessment, establishing itself as an effective solution for evaluating the reliability of information sources.

EXplainable AI has received significant attention in recent years. Machine learning models often operate as black boxes, lacking explainability and transparency while supporting decision-making processes. Local post-hoc explainability queries attempt to answer why individual inputs are classified in a certain way by a given model. While there has been important work on counterfactual explanations, less attention has been devoted to semifactual ones. In this paper, we focus on local post-hoc explainability queries within the semifactual `even-if' thinking and their computational complexity among different classes of models, and show that both linear and tree-based models are strictly more interpretable than neural networks. After this, we introduce a preference-based framework that enables users to personalize explanations based on their preferences, both in the case of semifactuals and counterfactuals, enhancing interpretability and user-centricity. Finally, we explore the complexity of several interpretability problems in the proposed preference-based framework and provide algorithms for polynomial cases.

This paper introduces ClimateGPT, a model family of domain-specific large language models that synthesize interdisciplinary research on climate change. We trained two 7B models from scratch on a science-oriented dataset of 300B tokens. For the first model, the 4.2B domain-specific tokens were included during pre-training and the second was adapted to the climate domain after pre-training. Additionally, ClimateGPT-7B, 13B and 70B are continuously pre-trained from Llama~2 on a domain-specific dataset of 4.2B tokens. Each model is instruction fine-tuned on a high-quality and human-generated domain-specific dataset that has been created in close cooperation with climate scientists. To reduce the number of hallucinations, we optimize the model for retrieval augmentation and propose a hierarchical retrieval strategy. To increase the accessibility of our model to non-English speakers, we propose to make use of cascaded machine translation and show that this approach can perform comparably to natively multilingual models while being easier to scale to a large number of languages. Further, to address the intrinsic interdisciplinary aspect of climate change we consider different research perspectives. Therefore, the model can produce in-depth answers focusing on different perspectives in addition to an overall answer. We propose a suite of automatic climate-specific benchmarks to evaluate LLMs. On these benchmarks, ClimateGPT-7B performs on par with the ten times larger Llama-2-70B Chat model while not degrading results on general domain benchmarks. Our human evaluation confirms the trends we saw in our benchmarks. All models were trained and evaluated using renewable energy and are released publicly.

The progress in generative models, particularly Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), opened new possibilities for image generation but raised concerns about potential malicious uses, especially in sensitive areas like medical imaging. This study introduces MITS-GAN, a novel approach to prevent tampering in medical images, with a specific focus on CT scans. The approach disrupts the output of the attacker's CT-GAN architecture by introducing imperceptible but yet precise perturbations. Specifically, the proposed approach involves the introduction of appropriate Gaussian noise to the input as a protective measure against various attacks. Our method aims to enhance tamper resistance, comparing favorably to existing techniques. Experimental results on a CT scan dataset demonstrate MITS-GAN's superior performance, emphasizing its ability to generate tamper-resistant images with negligible artifacts. As image tampering in medical domains poses life-threatening risks, our proactive approach contributes to the responsible and ethical use of generative models. This work provides a foundation for future research in countering cyber threats in medical imaging. Models and codes are publicly available at the following link \url{https://iplab.dmi.unict.it/MITS-GAN-2024/}.

The quality of recorded videos and images is significantly influenced by the camera's field of view (FOV). In critical applications like surveillance systems and self-driving cars, an inadequate FOV can give rise to severe safety and security concerns, including car accidents and thefts due to the failure to detect individuals and objects. The conventional methods for establishing the correct FOV heavily rely on human judgment and lack automated mechanisms to assess video and image quality based on FOV. In this paper, we introduce an innovative approach that harnesses semantic line detection and classification alongside deep Hough transform to identify semantic lines, thus ensuring a suitable FOV by understanding 3D view through parallel lines. Our approach yields an effective F1 score of 0.729 on the public EgoCart dataset, coupled with a notably high median score in the line placement metric. We illustrate that our method offers a straightforward means of assessing the quality of the camera's field of view, achieving a classification accuracy of 83.8\%. This metric can serve as a proxy for evaluating the potential performance of video and image quality applications.

The development of collective-aware multi-robot systems is crucial for enhancing the efficiency and robustness of robotic applications in multiple fields. These systems enable collaboration, coordination, and resource sharing among robots, leading to improved scalability, adaptability to dynamic environments, and increased overall system robustness. In this work, we want to provide a brief overview of this research topic and identify open challenges.

The world is three-dimensional (3D). As such, recovering 3D information about real-world objects allows the exploration of many relevant applications, including self-driving cars [1, 2], robot navigation [3, 4], virtual tourism [5, 6], infrastructure inspection [7, 8], archaeological [9, 10] and architectural modeling [5, 11], city planning [12, 13], and 3D cinema [14, 15]. Many sensors can be used to obtain 3D data from real objects, such as light detection and ranging [16], structured light [17], and time of flight [18]. There is a plethora of approaches for inferring 3D information from plain color images/videos. The widespread accessibility and low-cost of consumer cameras is a strong motivation for the continued research efforts devoted to image-based 3D scene reconstruction methods [19]. In theory, 3D information can only be inferred from two or more captures of the scene, as in typical multi-view stereo [20] or structure from motion [21] approaches. However, recent approaches are exploring machine learning to perform single-image depth inference [22, 23, 24]. Most methods developed so far rely on traditional perspective/pinhole-based cameras, which have a narrow field of view (FoV) and thus might require thousands of captures to model large scenes [25, 26].

The growing prevalence and rapid evolution of offensive language in social media amplify the complexities of detection, particularly highlighting the challenges in identifying such content across diverse languages. This survey presents a systematic and comprehensive exploration of Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning (CLTL) techniques in offensive language detection in social media. Our study stands as the first holistic overview to focus exclusively on the cross-lingual scenario in this domain. We analyse 67 relevant papers and categorise these studies across various dimensions, including the characteristics of multilingual datasets used, the cross-lingual resources employed, and the specific CLTL strategies implemented. According to "what to transfer", we also summarise three main CLTL transfer approaches: instance, feature, and parameter transfer. Additionally, we shed light on the current challenges and future research opportunities in this field. Furthermore, we have made our survey resources available online, including two comprehensive tables that provide accessible references to the multilingual datasets and CLTL methods used in the reviewed literature.

In the field of dentistry, there is a growing demand for increased precision in diagnostic tools, with a specific focus on advanced imaging techniques such as computed tomography, cone beam computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, ultrasound, and traditional intra-oral periapical X-rays. Deep learning has emerged as a pivotal tool in this context, enabling the implementation of automated segmentation techniques crucial for extracting essential diagnostic data. This integration of cutting-edge technology addresses the urgent need for effective management of dental conditions, which, if left undetected, can have a significant impact on human health. The impressive track record of deep learning across various domains, including dentistry, underscores its potential to revolutionize early detection and treatment of oral health issues. Objective: Having demonstrated significant results in diagnosis and prediction, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) represent an emerging field of multidisciplinary research. The goals of this study were to provide a concise overview of the state of the art, standardize the current debate, and establish baselines for future research. Method: In this study, a systematic literature review is employed as a methodology to identify and select relevant studies that specifically investigate the deep learning technique for dental imaging analysis. This study elucidates the methodological approach, including the systematic collection of data, statistical analysis, and subsequent dissemination of outcomes. Conclusion: This work demonstrates how Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can be employed to analyze images, serving as effective tools for detecting dental pathologies. Although this research acknowledged some limitations, CNNs utilized for segmenting and categorizing teeth exhibited their highest level of performance overall.