We present a system for Complex Event Recognition (CER) based on automata. While multiple such systems have been described in the literature, they typically suffer from a lack of clear and denotational semantics, a limitation which often leads to confusion with respect to their expressive power. In order to address this issue, our system is based on an automaton model which is a combination of symbolic and register automata. We extend previous work on these types of automata, in order to construct a formalism with clear semantics and a corresponding automaton model whose properties can be formally investigated. We call such automata Symbolic Register Transducers (SRT). We show that SRT are closed under various operators, but are not in general closed under complement and they are not determinizable. However, they are closed under these operations when a window operator, quintessential in Complex Event Recognition, is used. We show how SRT can be used in CER in order to detect patterns upon streams of events, using our framework that provides declarative and compositional semantics, and that allows for a systematic treatment of such automata. For SRT to work in pattern detection, we allow them to mark events from the input stream as belonging to a complex event or not, hence the name "transducers". We also present an implementation of SRT which can perform CER. We compare our SRT-based CER engine against other state-of-the-art CER systems and show that it is both more expressive and more efficient.

Existing event stream-based pattern recognition models usually represent the event stream as the point cloud, voxel, image, etc., and design various deep neural networks to learn their features. Although considerable results can be achieved in simple cases, however, the model performance may be limited by monotonous modality expressions, sub-optimal fusion, and readout mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a novel dual-stream framework for event stream-based pattern recognition via differentiated fusion, termed EFV++. It models two common event representations simultaneously, i.e., event images and event voxels. The spatial and three-dimensional stereo information can be learned separately by utilizing Transformer and Graph Neural Network (GNN). We believe the features of each representation still contain both efficient and redundant features and a sub-optimal solution may be obtained if we directly fuse them without differentiation. Thus, we divide each feature into three levels and retain high-quality features, blend medium-quality features, and exchange low-quality features. The enhanced dual features will be fed into the fusion Transformer together with bottleneck features. In addition, we introduce a novel hybrid interaction readout mechanism to enhance the diversity of features as final representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple widely used event stream-based classification datasets. Specifically, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance on the Bullying10k dataset, i.e., $90.51\%$, which exceeds the second place by $+2.21\%$. The source code of this paper has been released on \url{https://github.com/Event-AHU/EFV_event_classification/tree/EFVpp}.

There are substantial instructional videos on the Internet, which provide us tutorials for completing various tasks. Existing instructional video datasets only focus on specific steps at the video level, lacking experiential guidelines at the task level, which can lead to beginners struggling to learn new tasks due to the lack of relevant experience. Moreover, the specific steps without guidelines are trivial and unsystematic, making it difficult to provide a clear tutorial. To address these problems, we present the GUIDE (Guideline-Guided) dataset, which contains 3.5K videos of 560 instructional tasks in 8 domains related to our daily life. Specifically, we annotate each instructional task with a guideline, representing a common pattern shared by all task-related videos. On this basis, we annotate systematic specific steps, including their associated guideline steps, specific step descriptions and timestamps. Our proposed benchmark consists of three sub-tasks to evaluate comprehension ability of models: (1) Step Captioning: models have to generate captions for specific steps from videos. (2) Guideline Summarization: models have to mine the common pattern in task-related videos and summarize a guideline from them. (3) Guideline-Guided Captioning: models have to generate captions for specific steps under the guide of guideline. We evaluate plenty of foundation models with GUIDE and perform in-depth analysis. Given the diversity and practicality of GUIDE, we believe that it can be used as a better benchmark for instructional video comprehension.

Graph matching has important applications in pattern recognition and beyond. Current approaches predominantly adopt supervised learning, demanding extensive labeled data which can be limited or costly. Meanwhile, self-supervised learning methods for graph matching often require additional side information such as extra categorical information and input features, limiting their application to the general case. Moreover, designing the optimal graph augmentations for self-supervised graph matching presents another challenge to ensure robustness and efficacy. To address these issues, we introduce a novel Graph-centric Contrastive framework for Graph Matching (GCGM), capitalizing on a vast pool of graph augmentations for contrastive learning, yet without needing any side information. Given the variety of augmentation choices, we further introduce a Boosting-inspired Adaptive Augmentation Sampler (BiAS), which adaptively selects more challenging augmentations tailored for graph matching. Through various experiments, our GCGM surpasses state-of-the-art self-supervised methods across various datasets, marking a significant step toward more effective, efficient and general graph matching.

We consider the graph similarity computation (GSC) task based on graph edit distance (GED) estimation. State-of-the-art methods treat GSC as a learning-based prediction task using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). To capture fine-grained interactions between pair-wise graphs, these methods mostly contain a node-level matching module in the end-to-end learning pipeline, which causes high computational costs in both the training and inference stages. We show that the expensive node-to-node matching module is not necessary for GSC, and high-quality learning can be attained with a simple yet powerful regularization technique, which we call the Alignment Regularization (AReg). In the training stage, the AReg term imposes a node-graph correspondence constraint on the GNN encoder. In the inference stage, the graph-level representations learned by the GNN encoder are directly used to compute the similarity score without using AReg again to speed up inference. We further propose a multi-scale GED discriminator to enhance the expressive ability of the learned representations. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency and transferability of our approach.

The rapid advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) have promoted a revolution in communication technology and offered various customer services. Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have been exploited to facilitate IoT operations and maximize their potential in modern application scenarios. In particular, the convergence of IoT and AI has led to a new networking paradigm called Intelligent IoT (IIoT), which has the potential to significantly transform businesses and industrial domains. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of IIoT by investigating its significant applications in mobile networks, as well as its associated security and privacy issues. Specifically, we explore and discuss the roles of IIoT in a wide range of key application domains, from smart healthcare and smart cities to smart transportation and smart industries. Through such extensive discussions, we investigate important security issues in IIoT networks, where network attacks, confidentiality, integrity, and intrusion are analyzed, along with a discussion of potential countermeasures. Privacy issues in IIoT networks were also surveyed and discussed, including data, location, and model privacy leakage. Finally, we outline several key challenges and highlight potential research directions in this important area.

Amidst the surge in deep learning-based password guessing models, challenges of generating high-quality passwords and reducing duplicate passwords persist. To address these challenges, we present PagPassGPT, a password guessing model constructed on Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT). It can perform pattern guided guessing by incorporating pattern structure information as background knowledge, resulting in a significant increase in the hit rate. Furthermore, we propose D&C-GEN to reduce the repeat rate of generated passwords, which adopts the concept of a divide-and-conquer approach. The primary task of guessing passwords is recursively divided into non-overlapping subtasks. Each subtask inherits the knowledge from the parent task and predicts succeeding tokens. In comparison to the state-of-the-art model, our proposed scheme exhibits the capability to correctly guess 12% more passwords while producing 25% fewer duplicates.

Significant pattern mining is a fundamental task in mining transactional data, requiring to identify patterns significantly associated with the value of a given feature, the target. In several applications, such as biomedicine, basket market analysis, and social networks, the goal is to discover patterns whose association with the target is defined with respect to an underlying population, or process, of which the dataset represents only a collection of observations, or samples. A natural way to capture the association of a pattern with the target is to consider its statistical significance, assessing its deviation from the (null) hypothesis of independence between the pattern and the target. While several algorithms have been proposed to find statistically significant patterns, it remains a computationally demanding task, and for complex patterns such as subgroups, no efficient solution exists. We present FSR, an efficient algorithm to identify statistically significant patterns with rigorous guarantees on the probability of false discoveries. FSR builds on a novel general framework for mining significant patterns that captures some of the most commonly considered patterns, including itemsets, sequential patterns, and subgroups. FSR uses a small number of resampled datasets, obtained by assigning i.i.d. labels to each transaction, to rigorously bound the supremum deviation of a quality statistic measuring the significance of patterns. FSR builds on novel tight bounds on the supremum deviation that require to mine a small number of resampled datasets, while providing a high effectiveness in discovering significant patterns. As a test case, we consider significant subgroup mining, and our evaluation on several real datasets shows that FSR is effective in discovering significant subgroups, while requiring a small number of resampled datasets.

Artificial agents, particularly humanoid robots, interact with their environment, objects, and people using cameras, actuators, and physical presence. Their communication methods are often pre-programmed, limiting their actions and interactions. Our research explores acquiring non-verbal communication skills through learning from demonstrations, with potential applications in sign language comprehension and expression. In particular, we focus on imitation learning for artificial agents, exemplified by teaching a simulated humanoid American Sign Language. We use computer vision and deep learning to extract information from videos, and reinforcement learning to enable the agent to replicate observed actions. Compared to other methods, our approach eliminates the need for additional hardware to acquire information. We demonstrate how the combination of these different techniques offers a viable way to learn sign language. Our methodology successfully teaches 5 different signs involving the upper body (i.e., arms and hands). This research paves the way for advanced communication skills in artificial agents.

How (dis)similar are the learning trajectories of vision-language models and children? Recent modeling work has attempted to understand the gap between models' and humans' data efficiency by constructing models trained on less data, especially multimodal naturalistic data. However, such models are often evaluated on adult-level benchmarks, with limited breadth in language abilities tested, and without direct comparison to behavioral data. We introduce DevBench, a multimodal benchmark comprising seven language evaluation tasks spanning the domains of lexical, syntactic, and semantic ability, with behavioral data from both children and adults. We evaluate a set of vision-language models on these tasks, comparing models and humans not only on accuracy but on their response patterns. Across tasks, models exhibit variation in their closeness to human response patterns, and models that perform better on a task also more closely resemble human behavioral responses. We also examine the developmental trajectory of OpenCLIP over training, finding that greater training results in closer approximations to adult response patterns. DevBench thus provides a benchmark for comparing models to human language development. These comparisons highlight ways in which model and human language learning processes diverge, providing insight into entry points for improving language models.