Background: Software Vulnerability (SV) prediction needs large-sized and high-quality data to perform well. Current SV datasets mostly require expensive labeling efforts by experts (human-labeled) and thus are limited in size. Meanwhile, there are growing efforts in automatic SV labeling at scale. However, the fitness of auto-labeled data for SV prediction is still largely unknown. Aims: We quantitatively and qualitatively study the quality and use of the state-of-the-art auto-labeled SV data, D2A, for SV prediction. Method: Using multiple sources and manual validation, we curate clean SV data from human-labeled SV-fixing commits in two well-known projects for investigating the auto-labeled counterparts. Results: We discover that 50+% of the auto-labeled SVs are noisy (incorrectly labeled), and they hardly overlap with the publicly reported ones. Yet, SV prediction models utilizing the noisy auto-labeled SVs can perform up to 22% and 90% better in Matthews Correlation Coefficient and Recall, respectively, than the original models. We also reveal the promises and difficulties of applying noise-reduction methods for automatically addressing the noise in auto-labeled SV data to maximize the data utilization for SV prediction. Conclusions: Our study informs the benefits and challenges of using auto-labeled SVs, paving the way for large-scale SV prediction.

This article puts forward the use of mutual information values to replicate the expertise of security professionals in selecting features for detecting web attacks. The goal is to enhance the effectiveness of web application firewalls (WAFs). Web applications are frequently vulnerable to various security threats, making WAFs essential for their protection. WAFs analyze HTTP traffic using rule-based approaches to identify known attack patterns and to detect and block potential malicious requests. However, a major challenge is the occurrence of false positives, which can lead to blocking legitimate traffic and impact the normal functioning of the application. The problem is addressed as an approach that combines supervised learning for feature selection with a semi-supervised learning scenario for training a One-Class SVM model. The experimental findings show that the model trained with features selected by the proposed algorithm outperformed the expert-based selection approach in terms of performance. Additionally, the results obtained by the traditional rule-based WAF ModSecurity, configured with a vanilla set of OWASP CRS rules, were also improved.

Vision-based inspection algorithms have significantly contributed to quality control in industrial settings, particularly in addressing structural defects like dent and contamination which are prevalent in mass production. Extensive research efforts have led to the development of related benchmarks such as MVTec AD (Bergmann et al., 2019). However, in industrial settings, there can be instances of logical defects, where acceptable items are found in unsuitable locations or product pairs do not match as expected. Recent methods tackling logical defects effectively employ knowledge distillation to generate difference maps. Knowledge distillation (KD) is used to learn normal data distribution in unsupervised manner. Despite their effectiveness, these methods often overlook the potential false negatives. Excessive similarity between the teacher network and student network can hinder the generation of a suitable difference map for logical anomaly detection. This technical report provides insights on handling potential false negatives by utilizing a simple constraint in KD-based logical anomaly detection methods. We select EfficientAD as a state-of-the-art baseline and apply a margin-based constraint to its unsupervised learning scheme. Applying this constraint, we can improve the AUROC for MVTec LOCO AD by 1.3 %.

In this paper, we develop an unsupervised learning approach to earthquake detection. We train a specific class of deep auto-encoders that learn to reproduce the input waveforms after a data-compressive bottleneck, and then use a simple triggering algorithm at the bottleneck to label waveforms as noise or signal. Our approach is motivated by the intuition that efficient compression of data should represent signals differently from noise, and is facilitated by a time-axis-preserving approach to auto-encoding and intuitively-motivated choices on the architecture and triggering. We demonstrate that the detection performance of the unsupervised approach is comparable to, and in some cases better than, some of the state-of-the-art supervised methods. Moreover, it has strong \emph{cross-dataset generalization}. By experimenting with various modifications, we demonstrate that the detection performance is insensitive to various technical choices made in the algorithm. Our approach has the potential to be useful for other signal detection problems with time series data.

Recent advancements in massively multilingual machine translation systems have significantly enhanced translation accuracy; however, even the best performing systems still generate hallucinations, severely impacting user trust. Detecting hallucinations in Machine Translation (MT) remains a critical challenge, particularly since existing methods excel with High-Resource Languages (HRLs) but exhibit substantial limitations when applied to Low-Resource Languages (LRLs). This paper evaluates hallucination detection approaches using Large Language Models (LLMs) and semantic similarity within massively multilingual embeddings. Our study spans 16 language directions, covering HRLs, LRLs, with diverse scripts. We find that the choice of model is essential for performance. On average, for HRLs, Llama3-70B outperforms the previous state of the art by as much as 0.16 MCC (Matthews Correlation Coefficient). However, for LRLs we observe that Claude Sonnet outperforms other LLMs on average by 0.03 MCC. The key takeaway from our study is that LLMs can achieve performance comparable or even better than previously proposed models, despite not being explicitly trained for any machine translation task. However, their advantage is less significant for LRLs.

Wee Siong Ng 1 wsng@i2r.a-star.edu.sg 1 Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), A*ST AR, Singapore 2 School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore Abstract Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) achieves remarkable performance in various downstream tasks through the alignment of image and text input embeddings and holds great promise for anomaly detection. However, our empirical experiments show that the embeddings of text inputs unexpectedly tightly cluster together, far away from image embeddings, contrary to the model's contrastive training objective to align image-text input pairs. We show that this phenomenon induces a'similarity bias' - in which false negative and false positive errors occur due to bias in the similarities between images and the normal label text embeddings. To address this bias, we propose a novel methodology called BLISS which directly accounts for this similarity bias through the use of an auxiliary, external set of text inputs. BLISS is simple, it does not require strong inductive biases about anomalous behaviour nor an expensive training process, and it significantly outperforms baseline methods on benchmark image datasets, even when access to normal data is extremely limited. 1 Introduction Anomaly detection (AD) is an important task in many vision-related applications, such as medical diagnosis and industrial defect detection. Neural networks are trained to embed input images into a latent space where anomalies are more easily detected. Vision-language models (VLM), which embed both image and textual inputs, have surged in popularity recently due to their flexibility and strong performance in various downstream tasks.

Antimicrobial Resistance represents a significant challenge in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), where patients are at heightened risk of Multidrug-Resistant (MDR) infections-pathogens resistant to multiple antimicrobial agents. This study introduces a novel methodology that integrates Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) with advanced intrinsic and post-hoc interpretability techniques for detecting the onset of MDR in patients across time. Within interpretability methods, we propose Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) approaches to handle irregular Multivariate Time Series (MTS), introducing Irregular Time Shapley Additive Explanations (IT-SHAP), a modification of Shapley Additive Explanations designed for irregular MTS with Recurrent Neural Networks focused on temporal outputs. Our methodology aims to identify specific risk factors associated with MDR in ICU patients. GRU with Hadamard's attention demonstrated high initial specificity and increasing sensitivity over time, correlating with increased nosocomial infection risks during prolonged ICU stays. XAI analysis, enhanced by Hadamard attention and IT-SHAP, identified critical factors such as previous non-resistant cultures, specific antibiotic usage patterns, and hospital environment dynamics. These insights suggest that early detection of at-risk patients can inform interventions such as preventive isolation and customized treatments, significantly improving clinical outcomes. The proposed GRU model for temporal classification achieved an average Receiver Operating Characteristic Area Under the Curve of 78.27 +- 1.26 over time, indicating strong predictive performance. In summary, this study highlights the clinical utility of our methodology, which combines predictive accuracy with interpretability, thereby facilitating more effective healthcare interventions by professionals.

We propose a new method for feature learning and function estimation in supervised learning via regularised empirical risk minimisation. Our approach considers functions as expectations of Sobolev functions over all possible one-dimensional projections of the data. This framework is similar to kernel ridge regression, where the kernel is $\mathbb{E}_w ( k^{(B)}(w^\top x,w^\top x^\prime))$, with $k^{(B)}(a,b) := \min(|a|, |b|)1_{ab>0}$ the Brownian kernel, and the distribution of the projections $w$ is learnt. This can also be viewed as an infinite-width one-hidden layer neural network, optimising the first layer's weights through gradient descent and explicitly adjusting the non-linearity and weights of the second layer. We introduce an efficient computation method for the estimator, called Brownian Kernel Neural Network (BKerNN), using particles to approximate the expectation. The optimisation is principled due to the positive homogeneity of the Brownian kernel. Using Rademacher complexity, we show that BKerNN's expected risk converges to the minimal risk with explicit high-probability rates of $O( \min((d/n)^{1/2}, n^{-1/6}))$ (up to logarithmic factors). Numerical experiments confirm our optimisation intuitions, and BKerNN outperforms kernel ridge regression, and favourably compares to a one-hidden layer neural network with ReLU activations in various settings and real data sets.

General-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) systems are built on massive swathes of public web data, assembled into corpora such as C4, RefinedWeb, and Dolma. To our knowledge, we conduct the first, large-scale, longitudinal audit of the consent protocols for the web domains underlying AI training corpora. Our audit of 14,000 web domains provides an expansive view of crawlable web data and how codified data use preferences are changing over time. We observe a proliferation of AI-specific clauses to limit use, acute differences in restrictions on AI developers, as well as general inconsistencies between websites' expressed intentions in their Terms of Service and their robots.txt. We diagnose these as symptoms of ineffective web protocols, not designed to cope with the widespread re-purposing of the internet for AI. Our longitudinal analyses show that in a single year (2023-2024) there has been a rapid crescendo of data restrictions from web sources, rendering ~5%+ of all tokens in C4, or 28%+ of the most actively maintained, critical sources in C4, fully restricted from use. For Terms of Service crawling restrictions, a full 45% of C4 is now restricted. If respected or enforced, these restrictions are rapidly biasing the diversity, freshness, and scaling laws for general-purpose AI systems. We hope to illustrate the emerging crises in data consent, for both developers and creators. The foreclosure of much of the open web will impact not only commercial AI, but also non-commercial AI and academic research.

Recent advancements in natural language processing (NLP) have led to automation in various domains. However, clinical NLP often relies on benchmark datasets that may not reflect real-world scenarios accurately. Automatic ICD coding, a vital NLP task, typically uses outdated and imbalanced datasets like MIMIC-III, with existing methods yielding micro-averaged F1 scores between 0.4 and 0.7 due to many false positives. Our research introduces an enhanced approach to ICD coding that improves F1 scores by using chapter-based named entities and attentional models. This method categorizes discharge summaries into ICD-9 Chapters and develops attentional models with chapter-specific data, eliminating the need to consider external data for code identification. For categorization, we use Chapter-IV to de-bias and influence key entities and weights without neural networks, creating accurate thresholds and providing interpretability for human validation. Post-validation, we develop attentional models for three frequent and three non-frequent codes from Chapter-IV using Bidirectional-Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) with Attention and Transformer with Multi-head Attention architectures. The average Micro-F1 scores of 0.79 and 0.81 from these models demonstrate significant performance improvements in ICD coding.