Cuneiform tablets, emerging in ancient Mesopotamia around the late fourth millennium BCE, represent one of humanity's earliest writing systems. Characterized by wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, these artifacts provided insight into Mesopotamian civilization across various domains. Traditionally, the analysis and dating of these tablets rely on subjective assessment of shape and writing style, leading to uncertainties in pinpointing their exact temporal origins. Recent advances in digitization have revolutionized the study of cuneiform by enhancing accessibility and analytical capabilities. Our research uniquely focuses on the silhouette of tablets as significant indicators of their historical periods, diverging from most studies that concentrate on textual content. Utilizing an unprecedented dataset of over 94,000 images from the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative collection, we apply deep learning methods to classify cuneiform tablets, covering over 3,000 years of history. By leveraging statistical, computational techniques, and generative modeling through Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs), we achieve substantial advancements in the automatic classification of these ancient documents, focusing on the tablets' silhouettes as key predictors. Our classification approach begins with a Decision Tree using height-to-width ratios and culminates with a ResNet50 model, achieving a 61% macro F1-score for tablet silhouettes. Moreover, we introduce novel VAE-powered tools to enhance explainability and enable researchers to explore changes in tablet shapes across different eras and genres. This research contributes to document analysis and diplomatics by demonstrating the value of large-scale data analysis combined with statistical methods. These insights offer valuable tools for historians and epigraphists, enriching our understanding of cuneiform tablets and the cultures that produced them.

The notion of face described by Brown and Levinson (1987) has been studied in great detail, but a critical aspect of the framework, that which focuses on how intentions mediate the planning of turns which impose upon face, has received far less attention. We present an analysis of three computational systems trained for classifying both intention and politeness, focusing on how the former influences the latter. In politeness theory, agents attend to the desire to have their wants appreciated (positive face), and a complementary desire to act unimpeded and maintain freedom (negative face). Similar to speech acts, utterances can perform so-called face acts which can either raise or threaten the positive or negative face of the speaker or hearer. We begin by using an existing corpus to train a model which classifies face acts, achieving a new SoTA in the process. We then observe that every face act has an underlying intention that motivates it and perform additional experiments integrating dialog act annotations to provide these intentions by proxy. Our analysis finds that dialog acts improve performance on face act detection for minority classes and points to a close relationship between aspects of face and intent.

Next-item recommender systems are often trained using only positive feedback with randomly-sampled negative feedback. We show the benefits of using real negative feedback both as inputs into the user sequence and also as negative targets for training a next-song recommender system for internet radio. In particular, using explicit negative samples during training helps reduce training time by ~60% while also improving test accuracy by ~6%; adding user skips as additional inputs also can considerably increase user coverage alongside slightly improving accuracy. We test the impact of using a large number of random negative samples to capture a 'harder' one and find that the test accuracy increases with more randomly-sampled negatives, but only to a point. Too many random negatives leads to false negatives that limits the lift, which is still lower than if using true negative feedback. We also find that the test accuracy is fairly robust with respect to the proportion of different feedback types, and compare the learned embeddings for different feedback types.

Online signature verification plays a pivotal role in security infrastructures. However, conventional online signature verification models pose significant risks to data privacy, especially during training processes. To mitigate these concerns, we propose a novel federated learning framework that leverages 1-D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for online signature verification. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework regarding 1-D CNN and federated learning. Particularly, the experiment results highlight that our framework 1) minimizes local computational resources; 2) enhances transfer effects with substantial initialization data; 3) presents remarkable scalability. The centralized 1-D CNN model achieves an Equal Error Rate (EER) of 3.33% and an accuracy of 96.25%. Meanwhile, configurations with 2, 5, and 10 agents yield EERs of 5.42%, 5.83%, and 5.63%, along with accuracies of 95.21%, 94.17%, and 94.06%, respectively.

Fifth-generation (5G) core networks in network digital twins (NDTs) are complex systems with numerous components, generating considerable data. Analyzing these data can be challenging due to rare failure types, leading to imbalanced classes in multiclass classification. To address this problem, we propose a novel method of integrating a graph Fourier transform (GFT) into a message-passing neural network (MPNN) designed for NDTs. This approach transforms the data into a graph using the GFT to address class imbalance, whereas the MPNN extracts features and models dependencies between network components. This combined approach identifies failure types in real and simulated NDT environments, demonstrating its potential for accurate failure classification in 5G and beyond (B5G) networks. Moreover, the MPNN is adept at learning complex local structures among neighbors in an end-to-end setting. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that the proposed approach can identify failure types in three multiclass domain datasets at multiple failure points in real networks and NDT environments. The results demonstrate that the proposed GFT-MPNN can accurately classify network failures in B5G networks, especially when employed within NDTs to detect failure types.

This paper proposes a short-range FMCW radar-based facial authentication and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection framework. Our pipeline jointly estimates the correct classes for the in-distribution (ID) samples and detects the OOD samples to prevent their inaccurate prediction. Our reconstruction-based architecture consists of a main convolutional block with one encoder and multi-decoder configuration, and intermediate linear encoder-decoder parts. Together, these elements form an accurate human face classifier and a robust OOD detector. For our dataset, gathered using a 60 GHz short-range FMCW radar, our network achieves an average classification accuracy of 98.07% in identifying in-distribution human faces. As an OOD detector, it achieves an average Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUROC) curve of 98.50% and an average False Positive Rate at 95% True Positive Rate (FPR95) of 6.20%. Also, our extensive experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms previous OOD detectors in terms of common OOD detection metrics.

Dataset distillation has emerged as a strategy to overcome the hurdles associated with large datasets by learning a compact set of synthetic data that retains essential information from the original dataset. While distilled data can be used to train high performing models, little is understood about how the information is stored. In this study, we posit and answer three questions about the behavior, representativeness, and point-wise information content of distilled data. We reveal distilled data cannot serve as a substitute for real data during training outside the standard evaluation setting for dataset distillation. Additionally, the distillation process retains high task performance by compressing information related to the early training dynamics of real models. Finally, we provide an framework for interpreting distilled data and reveal that individual distilled data points contain meaningful semantic information. This investigation sheds light on the intricate nature of distilled data, providing a better understanding on how they can be effectively utilized.

Ultrasound imaging has been widely used in clinical examinations owing to the advantages of being portable, real-time, and radiation-free. Considering the potential of extensive deployment of autonomous examination systems in hospitals, robotic US imaging has attracted increased attention. However, due to the inter-patient variations, it is still challenging to have an optimal path for each patient, particularly for thoracic applications with limited acoustic windows, e.g., intercostal liver imaging. To address this problem, a class-aware cartilage bone segmentation network with geometry-constraint post-processing is presented to capture patient-specific rib skeletons. Then, a dense skeleton graph-based non-rigid registration is presented to map the intercostal scanning path from a generic template to individual patients. By explicitly considering the high-acoustic impedance bone structures, the transferred scanning path can be precisely located in the intercostal space, enhancing the visibility of internal organs by reducing the acoustic shadow. To evaluate the proposed approach, the final path mapping performance is validated on five distinct CTs and two volunteer US data, resulting in ten pairs of CT-US combinations. Results demonstrate that the proposed graph-based registration method can robustly and precisely map the path from CT template to individual patients (Euclidean error: $2.21\pm1.11~mm$).

Many classic Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms rely on a Bellman operator, which involves an expectation over the next states, leading to the concept of bootstrapping. To introduce a form of pessimism, we propose to replace this expectation with an expectile. In practice, this can be very simply done by replacing the $L_2$ loss with a more general expectile loss for the critic. Introducing pessimism in RL is desirable for various reasons, such as tackling the overestimation problem (for which classic solutions are double Q-learning or the twin-critic approach of TD3) or robust RL (where transitions are adversarial). We study empirically these two cases. For the overestimation problem, we show that the proposed approach, ExpectRL, provides better results than a classic twin-critic. On robust RL benchmarks, involving changes of the environment, we show that our approach is more robust than classic RL algorithms. We also introduce a variation of ExpectRL combined with domain randomization which is competitive with state-of-the-art robust RL agents. Eventually, we also extend \ExpectRL with a mechanism for choosing automatically the expectile value, that is the degree of pessimism

The evolution of industry has enabled the integration of physical and digital systems, facilitating the collection of extensive data on manufacturing processes. This integration provides a reliable solution for improving process quality and managing equipment health. However, data collected from real manufacturing processes often exhibit challenging properties, such as severe class imbalance, high rates of missing values, and noisy features, which hinder effective machine learning implementation. In this study, a rare class prediction approach is developed for in situ data collected from a smart semiconductor manufacturing process. The primary objective is to build a model that addresses issues of noise and class imbalance, enhancing class separation. The developed approach demonstrated promising results compared to existing literature, which would allow the prediction of new observations that could give insights into future maintenance plans and production quality. The model was evaluated using various performance metrics, with ROC curves showing an AUC of 0.95, a precision of 0.66, and a recall of 0.96