Abstract: In this paper, we suggest a way, how to use SIFT and SURF algorithms to extract the image features for anomaly detection. We use those feature vectors to train various classifiers on a real-world dataset in the semi -supervised (with a small number of faulty samples) manner with a large number of classifiers and in the one-class (with no faulty samples) manner using the SVDD and SVM classifier. We prove, that the SIFT and SURF algorithms could be used as feature extractors, that they could be used to train a semi-supervised and one-class classifier with an accuracy around 89% and that the performance of the one-class classifier could be comparable to the semi-supervised one. We also made our dataset and source code publicly available. Keywords: Anomaly detection, Object descriptors, Machine Learning, SIFT, SURF 1 INTRODUCTION The anomaly detection (AD) techniques are state-of the art methods for outliers detection in industrial, or medical diagnosis tasks.

Modern black-box predictive models are often accompanied by weak performance guarantees that only hold asymptotically in the size of the dataset or require strong parametric assumptions. In response to this, split conformal prediction represents a promising avenue to obtain finite-sample guarantees under minimal distribution-free assumptions. Although prediction set validity most often concerns marginal coverage, we explore the related but different guarantee of tolerance regions, reformulating known results in the language of nested prediction sets and extending on the duality between marginal coverage and tolerance regions. Furthermore, we highlight the connection between split conformal prediction and classical tolerance predictors developed in the 1940s, as well as recent developments in distribution-free risk control. One result that transfers from classical tolerance predictors is that the coverage of a prediction set based on order statistics, conditional on the calibration set, is a random variable stochastically dominating the Beta distribution. We demonstrate the empirical effectiveness of our findings on synthetic and real datasets using a popular split conformal prediction procedure called conformalized quantile regression (CQR).

Recent network traffic classification methods benefitfrom machine learning (ML) technology. However, there aremany challenges due to use of ML, such as: lack of high-qualityannotated datasets, data-drifts and other effects causing aging ofdatasets and ML models, high volumes of network traffic etc. Thispaper argues that it is necessary to augment traditional workflowsof ML training&deployment and adapt Active Learning concepton network traffic analysis. The paper presents a novel ActiveLearning Framework (ALF) to address this topic. ALF providesprepared software components that can be used to deploy an activelearning loop and maintain an ALF instance that continuouslyevolves a dataset and ML model automatically. The resultingsolution is deployable for IP flow-based analysis of high-speed(100 Gb/s) networks, and also supports research experiments ondifferent strategies and methods for annotation, evaluation, datasetoptimization, etc. Finally, the paper lists some research challengesthat emerge from the first experiments with ALF in practice.

Pre-trained language models encode undesirable social biases, which are further exacerbated in downstream use. To this end, we propose MABEL (a Method for Attenuating Gender Bias using Entailment Labels), an intermediate pre-training approach for mitigating gender bias in contextualized representations. Key to our approach is the use of a contrastive learning objective on counterfactually augmented, gender-balanced entailment pairs from natural language inference (NLI) datasets. We also introduce an alignment regularizer that pulls identical entailment pairs along opposite gender directions closer. We extensively evaluate our approach on intrinsic and extrinsic metrics, and show that MABEL outperforms previous task-agnostic debiasing approaches in terms of fairness. It also preserves task performance after fine-tuning on downstream tasks. Together, these findings demonstrate the suitability of NLI data as an effective means of bias mitigation, as opposed to only using unlabeled sentences in the literature. Finally, we identify that existing approaches often use evaluation settings that are insufficient or inconsistent. We make an effort to reproduce and compare previous methods, and call for unifying the evaluation settings across gender debiasing methods for better future comparison.

Entity resolution, a longstanding problem of data cleaning and integration, aims at identifying data records that represent the same real-world entity. Existing approaches treat entity resolution as a universal task, assuming the existence of a single interpretation of a real-world entity and focusing only on finding matched records, separating corresponding from non-corresponding ones, with respect to this single interpretation. However, in real-world scenarios, where entity resolution is part of a more general data project, downstream applications may have varying interpretations of real-world entities relating, for example, to various user needs. In what follows, we introduce the problem of multiple intents entity resolution (MIER), an extension to the universal (single intent) entity resolution task. As a solution, we propose FlexER, utilizing contemporary solutions to universal entity resolution tasks to solve multiple intents entity resolution. FlexER addresses the problem as a multi-label classification problem. It combines intent-based representations of tuple pairs using a multiplex graph representation that serves as an input to a graph neural network (GNN). FlexER learns intent representations and improves the outcome to multiple resolution problems. A large-scale empirical evaluation introduces a new benchmark and, using also two well-known benchmarks, shows that FlexER effectively solves the MIER problem and outperforms the state-of-the-art for a universal entity resolution.

Class imbalance has a detrimental effect on the predictive performance of most supervised learning algorithms as the imbalanced distribution can lead to a bias preferring the majority class. To solve this problem, we propose a Supervised Contrastive Learning (SCL) method with Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE) technique for imbalanced tabular datasets. Contrastive learning (CL) can extract the information hidden in data even without labels and has shown some potential for imbalanced learning tasks. SCL further considers the label information based on CL, which also addresses the insufficient data augmentation techniques of tabular data. Therefore, in this work, we propose to use SCL to learn a discriminative representation of imbalanced tabular data. Additionally, the hyper-parameter temperature of SCL has a decisive influence on the performance and is difficult to tune. We introduce TPE, a well-known Bayesian optimization technique, to automatically select the best temperature. Experiments are conducted on both binary and multi-class imbalanced tabular datasets. As shown in the results obtained, TPE outperforms three other hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) methods such as grid search, random search, and genetic algorithm. More importantly, the proposed SCL-TPE method achieves much-improved performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Punctuation and Segmentation are key to readability in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), often evaluated using F1 scores that require high-quality human transcripts and do not reflect readability well. Human evaluation is expensive, time-consuming, and suffers from large inter-observer variability, especially in conversational speech devoid of strict grammatical structures. Large pre-trained models capture a notion of grammatical structure. We present TRScore, a novel readability measure using the GPT model to evaluate different segmentation and punctuation systems. We validate our approach with human experts. Additionally, our approach enables quantitative assessment of text post-processing techniques such as capitalization, inverse text normalization (ITN), and disfluency on overall readability, which traditional word error rate (WER) and slot error rate (SER) metrics fail to capture. TRScore is strongly correlated to traditional F1 and human readability scores, with Pearson's correlation coefficients of 0.67 and 0.98, respectively. It also eliminates the need for human transcriptions for model selection.

Most studies in computational modeling of visual attention encompass task-free observation of images. Free-viewing saliency considers limited scenarios of daily life. Most visual activities are goal-oriented and demand a great amount of top-down attention control. Visual search task demands more top-down control of attention, compared to free-viewing. In this paper, we present two approaches to model visual attention and distraction of observers during visual search. Our first approach adapts a light-weight free-viewing saliency model to predict eye fixation density maps of human observers over pixels of search images, using a two-stream convolutional encoder-decoder network, trained and evaluated on COCO-Search18 dataset. This method predicts which locations are more distracting when searching for a particular target. Our network achieves good results on standard saliency metrics (AUC-Judd=0.95, AUC-Borji=0.85, sAUC=0.84, NSS=4.64, KLD=0.93, CC=0.72, SIM=0.54, and IG=2.59). Our second approach is object-based and predicts the distractor and target objects during visual search. Distractors are all objects except the target that observers fixate on during search. This method uses a Mask-RCNN segmentation network pre-trained on MS-COCO and fine-tuned on COCO-Search18 dataset. We release our segmentation annotations of targets and distractors in COCO-Search18 for three target categories: bottle, bowl, and car. The average scores over the three categories are: F1-score=0.64, MAP(iou:0.5)=0.57, MAR(iou:0.5)=0.73. Our implementation code in Tensorflow is publicly available at https://github.com/ManooshSamiei/Distraction-Visual-Search .

In this paper, we examine the use of data from multiple sensing modes, i.e., accelerometry and global navigation satellite system (GNSS), for classifying animal behavior. We extract three new features from the GNSS data, namely, distance from water point, median speed, and median estimated horizontal position error. We combine the information available from the accelerometry and GNSS data via two approaches. The first approach is based on concatenating the features extracted from both sensor data and feeding the concatenated feature vector into a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) classifier. The second approach is based on fusing the posterior probabilities predicted by two MLP classifiers. The input to each classifier is the features extracted from the data of one sensing mode. We evaluate the performance of the developed multimodal animal behavior classification algorithms using two real-world datasets collected via smart cattle collar tags and ear tags. The leave-one-animal-out cross-validation results show that both approaches improve the classification performance appreciably compared with using data of only one sensing mode. This is more notable for the infrequent but important behaviors of walking and drinking. The algorithms developed based on both approaches require little computational and memory resources hence are suitable for implementation on embedded systems of our collar tags and ear tags. However, the multimodal animal behavior classification algorithm based on posterior probability fusion is preferable to the one based on feature concatenation as it delivers better classification accuracy, has less computational and memory complexity, is more robust to sensor data failure, and enjoys better modularity.

Discovering causal relationships between different variables from time series data has been a long-standing challenge for many domains such as climate science, finance, and healthcare. Given the complexity of real-world relationships and the nature of observations in discrete time, causal discovery methods need to consider non-linear relations between variables, instantaneous effects and history-dependent noise (the change of noise distribution due to past actions). However, previous works do not offer a solution addressing all these problems together. In this paper, we propose a novel causal relationship learning framework for time-series data, called Rhino, which combines vector auto-regression, deep learning and variational inference to model non-linear relationships with instantaneous effects while allowing the noise distribution to be modulated by historical observations. Theoretically, we prove the structural identifiability of Rhino. Our empirical results from extensive synthetic experiments and two real-world benchmarks demonstrate better discovery performance compared to relevant baselines, with ablation studies revealing its robustness under model misspecification.