Machine Learning (ML) has become a valuable asset to solve many real-world tasks. For Network Intrusion Detection (NID), however, scientific advances in ML are still seen with skepticism by practitioners. This disconnection is due to the intrinsically limited scope of research papers, many of which primarily aim to demonstrate new methods ``outperforming'' prior work -- oftentimes overlooking the practical implications for deploying the proposed solutions in real systems. Unfortunately, the value of ML for NID depends on a plethora of factors, such as hardware, that are often neglected in scientific literature. This paper aims to reduce the practitioners' skepticism towards ML for NID by "changing" the evaluation methodology adopted in research. After elucidating which "factors" influence the operational deployment of ML in NID, we propose the notion of "pragmatic assessment", which enable practitioners to gauge the real value of ML methods for NID. Then, we show that the state-of-research hardly allows one to estimate the value of ML for NID. As a constructive step forward, we carry out a pragmatic assessment. We re-assess existing ML methods for NID, focusing on the classification of malicious network traffic, and consider: hundreds of configuration settings; diverse adversarial scenarios; and four hardware platforms. Our large and reproducible evaluations enable estimating the quality of ML for NID. We also validate our claims through a user-study with security practitioners.

We propose EBLIME to explain black-box machine learning models and obtain the distribution of feature importance using Bayesian ridge regression models. We provide mathematical expressions of the Bayesian framework and theoretical outcomes including the significance of ridge parameter. Case studies were conducted on benchmark datasets and a real-world industrial application of locating internal defects in manufactured products. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, EBLIME yields more intuitive and accurate results, with better uncertainty quantification in terms of deriving the posterior distribution, credible intervals, and rankings of the feature importance.

We extend conformal prediction to control the expected value of any monotone loss function. The algorithm generalizes split conformal prediction together with its coverage guarantee. Like conformal prediction, the conformal risk control procedure is tight up to an $\mathcal{O}(1/n)$ factor. We also introduce extensions of the idea to distribution shift, quantile risk control, multiple and adversarial risk control, and expectations of U-statistics. Worked examples from computer vision and natural language processing demonstrate the usage of our algorithm to bound the false negative rate, graph distance, and token-level F1-score.

Multivariate biosignals are prevalent in many medical domains, such as electroencephalography, polysomnography, and electrocardiography. Modeling spatiotemporal dependencies in multivariate biosignals is challenging due to (1) long-range temporal dependencies and (2) complex spatial correlations between the electrodes. To address these challenges, we propose representing multivariate biosignals as time-dependent graphs and introduce GraphS4mer, a general graph neural network (GNN) architecture that improves performance on biosignal classification tasks by modeling spatiotemporal dependencies in biosignals. Specifically, (1) we leverage the Structured State Space architecture, a state-of-the-art deep sequence model, to capture long-range temporal dependencies in biosignals and (2) we propose a graph structure learning layer in GraphS4mer to learn dynamically evolving graph structures in the data. We evaluate our proposed model on three distinct biosignal classification tasks and show that GraphS4mer consistently improves over existing models, including (1) seizure detection from electroencephalographic signals, outperforming a previous GNN with self-supervised pre-training by 3.1 points in AUROC; (2) sleep staging from polysomnographic signals, a 4.1 points improvement in macro-F1 score compared to existing sleep staging models; and (3) 12-lead electrocardiogram classification, outperforming previous state-of-the-art models by 2.7 points in macro-F1 score.

Energy Efficiency of a wireless sensor network (WSN) relies on its main characteristics, including hop-number, user's location, allocated power, and relay. Identifying nodes, which have more impact on these characteristics, is, however, subject to a substantial computational overhead and energy consumption. In this paper, we proposed an active learning approach to address the computational overhead of identifying critical nodes in a WSN. The proposed approach can overcome biasing in identifying non-critical nodes and needs much less effort in fine-tuning to adapt to the dynamic nature of WSN. This method benefits from the cooperation of clustering and classification modules to iteratively decrease the required number of data in a typical supervised learning scenario and to increase the accuracy in the presence of uninformative examples, i.e., non-critical nodes. Experiments show that the proposed method has more flexibility, compared to the state-of-the-art, to be employed in large scale WSN environments, the fifth-generation mobile networks (5G), and massively distributed IoT (i.e., sensor networks), where it can prolong the network lifetime.

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is the task of automatically detecting and correcting errors in text. The task not only includes the correction of grammatical errors, such as missing prepositions and mismatched subject-verb agreement, but also orthographic and semantic errors, such as misspellings and word choice errors respectively. The field has seen significant progress in the last decade, motivated in part by a series of five shared tasks, which drove the development of rule-based methods, statistical classifiers, statistical machine translation, and finally neural machine translation systems which represent the current dominant state of the art. In this survey paper, we condense the field into a single article and first outline some of the linguistic challenges of the task, introduce the most popular datasets that are available to researchers (for both English and other languages), and summarise the various methods and techniques that have been developed with a particular focus on artificial error generation. We next describe the many different approaches to evaluation as well as concerns surrounding metric reliability, especially in relation to subjective human judgements, before concluding with an overview of recent progress and suggestions for future work and remaining challenges. We hope that this survey will serve as comprehensive resource for researchers who are new to the field or who want to be kept apprised of recent developments.

For patients suffering from central nervous system tumors, prognosis estimation, treatment decisions, and postoperative assessments are made from the analysis of a set of magnetic resonance (MR) scans. Currently, the lack of open tools for standardized and automatic tumor segmentation and generation of clinical reports, incorporating relevant tumor characteristics, leads to potential risks from inherent decisions' subjectivity. To tackle this problem, the proposed Raidionics open-source software has been developed, offering both a user-friendly graphical user interface and stable processing backend. The software includes preoperative segmentation models for each of the most common tumor types (i.e., glioblastomas, lower grade gliomas, meningiomas, and metastases), together with one early postoperative glioblastoma segmentation model. Preoperative segmentation performances were quite homogeneous across the four different brain tumor types, with an average Dice around 85% and patient-wise recall and precision around 95%. Postoperatively, performances were lower with an average Dice of 41%. Overall, the generation of a standardized clinical report, including the tumor segmentation and features computation, requires about ten minutes on a regular laptop. The proposed Raidionics software is the first open solution enabling an easy use of state-of-the-art segmentation models for all major tumor types, including preoperative and postsurgical standardized reports.

Losing pets can be highly distressing for pet owners, and finding a lost pet is often challenging and time-consuming. An artificial intelligence-based application can significantly improve the speed and accuracy of finding lost pets. In order to facilitate such an application, this study introduces a contrastive neural network model capable of accurately distinguishing between images of pets. The model was trained on a large dataset of dog images and evaluated through 3-fold cross-validation. Following 350 epochs of training, the model achieved a test accuracy of 90%. Furthermore, overfitting was avoided, as the test accuracy closely matched the training accuracy. Our findings suggest that contrastive neural network models hold promise as a tool for locating lost pets. This paper provides the foundation for a potential web application that allows users to upload images of their missing pets, receiving notifications when matching images are found in the application's image database. This would enable pet owners to quickly and accurately locate lost pets and reunite them with their families.

We present an alternative to reweighting techniques for modifying distributions to account for a desired change in an underlying conditional distribution, as is often needed to correct for mis-modelling in a simulated sample. We employ conditional normalizing flows to learn the full conditional probability distribution from which we sample new events for conditional values drawn from the target distribution to produce the desired, altered distribution. In contrast to common reweighting techniques, this procedure is independent of binning choice and does not rely on an estimate of the density ratio between two distributions. In several toy examples we show that normalizing flows outperform reweighting approaches to match the distribution of the target. We demonstrate that the corrected distribution closes well with the ground truth, and a statistical uncertainty on the training dataset can be ascertained with bootstrapping. In our examples, this leads to a statistical precision up to three times greater than using reweighting techniques with identical sample sizes for the source and target distributions. We also explore an application in the context of high energy particle physics.

In the realm of machine learning, the study of anomaly detection and localization within image data has gained substantial traction, particularly for practical applications such as industrial defect detection. While the majority of existing methods predominantly use Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) as their primary network architecture, we introduce a novel approach based on the Transformer backbone network. Our method employs a two-stage incremental learning strategy. During the first stage, we train a Masked Autoencoder (MAE) model solely on normal images. In the subsequent stage, we apply pixel-level data augmentation techniques to generate corrupted normal images and their corresponding pixel labels. This process allows the model to learn how to repair corrupted regions and classify the status of each pixel. Ultimately, the model generates a pixel reconstruction error matrix and a pixel anomaly probability matrix. These matrices are then combined to produce an anomaly scoring matrix that effectively detects abnormal regions. When benchmarked against several state-of-the-art CNN-based methods, our approach exhibits superior performance on the MVTec AD dataset, achieving an impressive 97.6% AUC.