In the realm of cybersecurity, intrusion detection systems (IDS) detect and prevent attacks based on collected computer and network data. In recent research, IDS models have been constructed using machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods such as Random Forest (RF) and deep neural networks (DNN). Feature selection (FS) can be used to construct faster, more interpretable, and more accurate models. We look at three different FS techniques; RF information gain (RF-IG), correlation feature selection using the Bat Algorithm (CFS-BA), and CFS using the Aquila Optimizer (CFS-AO). Our results show CFS-BA to be the most efficient of the FS methods, building in 55% of the time of the best RF-IG model while achieving 99.99% of its accuracy. This reinforces prior contributions attesting to CFS-BA's accuracy while building upon the relationship between subset size, CFS score, and RF-IG score in final results.

Artificial intelligence methods show great promise in increasing the quality and speed of work with large astronomical datasets, but the high complexity of these methods leads to the extraction of dataset-specific, nonrobust features. Therefore, such methods do not generalize well across multiple datasets. We present a universal domain adaptation method, DeepAstroUDA, as an approach to overcome this challenge. This algorithm performs semi-supervised domain adaptation and can be applied to datasets with different data distributions and class overlaps. Non-overlapping classes can be present in any of the two datasets (the labeled source domain, or the unlabeled target domain), and the method can even be used in the presence of unknown classes. We apply our method to three examples of galaxy morphology classification tasks of different complexities (3-class and 10-class problems), with anomaly detection: 1) datasets created after different numbers of observing years from a single survey (LSST mock data of 1 and 10 years of observations); 2) data from different surveys (SDSS and DECaLS); and 3) data from observing fields with different depths within one survey (wide field and Stripe 82 deep field of SDSS). For the first time, we demonstrate the successful use of domain adaptation between very discrepant observational datasets. DeepAstroUDA is capable of bridging the gap between two astronomical surveys, increasing classification accuracy in both domains (up to 40% on the unlabeled data), and making model performance consistent across datasets. Furthermore, our method also performs well as an anomaly detection algorithm and successfully clusters unknown class samples even in the unlabeled target dataset.

Exogenous state variables and rewards can slow reinforcement learning by injecting uncontrolled variation into the reward signal. This paper formalizes exogenous state variables and rewards and shows that if the reward function decomposes additively into endogenous and exogenous components, the MDP can be decomposed into an exogenous Markov Reward Process (based on the exogenous reward) and an endogenous Markov Decision Process (optimizing the endogenous reward). Any optimal policy for the endogenous MDP is also an optimal policy for the original MDP, but because the endogenous reward typically has reduced variance, the endogenous MDP is easier to solve. We study settings where the decomposition of the state space into exogenous and endogenous state spaces is not given but must be discovered. The paper introduces and proves correctness of algorithms for discovering the exogenous and endogenous subspaces of the state space when they are mixed through linear combination. These algorithms can be applied during reinforcement learning to discover the exogenous space, remove the exogenous reward, and focus reinforcement learning on the endogenous MDP. Experiments on a variety of challenging synthetic MDPs show that these methods, applied online, discover large exogenous state spaces and produce substantial speedups in reinforcement learning.

A fundamental problem in quantum physics is to encode functions that are completely anti-symmetric under permutations of identical particles. The Barron space consists of high-dimensional functions that can be parameterized by infinite neural networks with one hidden layer. By explicitly encoding the anti-symmetric structure, we prove that the anti-symmetric functions which belong to the Barron space can be efficiently approximated with sums of determinants. This yields a factorial improvement in complexity compared to the standard representation in the Barron space and provides a theoretical explanation for the effectiveness of determinant-based architectures in ab-initio quantum chemistry.

Poor air quality can have a significant impact on human health. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) air quality forecasting guidance is challenged by the increasing presence of extreme air quality events due to extreme weather events such as wild fires and heatwaves. These extreme air quality events further affect human health. Traditional methods used to correct model bias make assumptions about linearity and the underlying distribution. Extreme air quality events tend to occur without a strong signal leading up to the event and this behavior tends to cause existing methods to either under or over compensate for the bias. Deep learning holds promise for air quality forecasting in the presence of extreme air quality events due to its ability to generalize and learn nonlinear problems. However, in the presence of these anomalous air quality events, standard deep network approaches that use a single network for generalizing to future forecasts, may not always provide the best performance even with a full feature-set including geography and meteorology. In this work we describe a method that combines unsupervised learning and a forecast-aware bi-directional LSTM network to perform bias correction for operational air quality forecasting using AirNow station data for ozone and PM2.5 in the continental US. Using an unsupervised clustering method trained on station geographical features such as latitude and longitude, urbanization, and elevation, the learned clusters direct training by partitioning the training data for the LSTM networks. LSTMs are forecast-aware and implemented using a unique way to perform learning forward and backwards in time across forecasting days. When comparing the RMSE of the forecast model to the RMSE of the bias corrected model, the bias corrected model shows significant improvement (27\% lower RMSE for ozone) over the base forecast.

Deep generative learning cannot only be used for generating new data with statistical characteristics derived from input data but also for anomaly detection, by separating nominal and anomalous instances based on their reconstruction quality. In this paper, we explore the performance of three unsupervised deep generative models -- variational autoencoders (VAEs) with Gaussian, Bernoulli, and Boltzmann priors -- in detecting anomalies in flight-operations data of commercial flights consisting of multivariate time series. We devised two VAE models with discrete latent variables (DVAEs), one with a factorized Bernoulli prior and one with a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) as prior, because of the demand for discrete-variable models in machine-learning applications and because the integration of quantum devices based on two-level quantum systems requires such models. The DVAE with RBM prior, using a relatively simple -- and classically or quantum-mechanically enhanceable -- sampling technique for the evolution of the RBM's negative phase, performed better than the Bernoulli DVAE and on par with the Gaussian model, which has a continuous latent space. Our studies demonstrate the competitiveness of a discrete deep generative model with its Gaussian counterpart on anomaly-detection tasks. Moreover, the DVAE model with RBM prior can be easily integrated with quantum sampling by outsourcing its generative process to measurements of quantum states obtained from a quantum annealer or gate-model device.

In practice, metric analysis on a specific train and test dataset does not guarantee reliable or fair ML models. This is partially due to the fact that obtaining a balanced, diverse, and perfectly labeled dataset is typically expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone. Rather than relying on a carefully designed test set to assess ML models' failures, fairness, or robustness, this paper proposes Semantic Image Attack (SIA), a method based on the adversarial attack that provides semantic adversarial images to allow model diagnosis, interpretability, and robustness. Traditional adversarial training is a popular methodology for robustifying ML models against attacks. However, existing adversarial methods do not combine the two aspects that enable the interpretation and analysis of the model's flaws: semantic traceability and perceptual quality. SIA combines the two features via iterative gradient ascent on a predefined semantic attribute space and the image space. We illustrate the validity of our approach in three scenarios for keypoint detection and classification. (1) Model diagnosis: SIA generates a histogram of attributes that highlights the semantic vulnerability of the ML model (i.e., attributes that make the model fail). (2) Stronger attacks: SIA generates adversarial examples with visually interpretable attributes that lead to higher attack success rates than baseline methods. The adversarial training on SIA improves the transferable robustness across different gradient-based attacks. (3) Robustness to imbalanced datasets: we use SIA to augment the underrepresented classes, which outperforms strong augmentation and re-balancing baselines.

The viral AI-generated images of Donald Trump's arrest you may be seeing on social media are definitely fake. But some of these photorealistic creations are pretty convincing. Others look more like stills from a video game or a lucid dream. A Twitter thread by Eliot Higgins, a founder of Bellingcat, that shows Trump getting swarmed by synthetic cops, running around on the lam, and picking out a prison jumpsuit was viewed over 3 million times on the social media platform. What does Higgins think viewers can do to tell the difference between fake, AI images, like the ones in his post, from real photographs that may come out of the former president's potential arrest?

Artificial intelligence has its ups and downs, but the Florida Department of Transportation is using the upside of the technology to improve safety when opening and closing their bridges. "Using technology to improve safety is something big for us and we're doing it," said Pablo Orozco, District 6 Structures Maintenance Engineer with the Florida Department of Transportation. The AI pilot program with the FDOT began in 2019 and is being tested out on the 5th Street Bridge which goes over the Miami River. Engineers showed NBC 6 how the technology works. "When it opens, we have defined an area that is unsafe for pedestrians or any cars or bicyclists and it will stop the bridge from opening if they are in that unsafe area," said Orozco.

Moatasem Jibril, a young man from Sudan, is realising his dream of conducting technological experiments to manufacture robots by using recycled electronic waste. Despite modest capabilities and living in a mud house in the city of Omdurman, west of the capital, Khartoum, Jibril did not give up on his dream of making a robot, even after having to quit university due to the deteriorating economic conditions of his family. For about ten years, Jibril has been trying to create robots in a narrow space inside his family house, and he challenges poverty by working daily in the market to earn money to purchase the materials he needs for his project. He hopes that his dream will be funded by any businessman or institution. Sudan is suffering from many crises, starting with a shortage of basic and imported commodities, as well as the depreciation of the local currency, in addition to the government's measures to lift fuel subsidies at the request of the International Monetary Fund in 2021.