Remarkable successes were made in Medical Image Classification (MIC) recently, mainly due to wide applications of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, adversarial examples (AEs) exhibited imperceptible similarity with raw data, raising serious concerns on network robustness. Although adversarial training (AT), in responding to malevolent AEs, was recognized as an effective approach to improve robustness, it was challenging to overcome generalization decline of networks caused by the AT. In this paper, in order to reserve high generalization while improving robustness, we proposed a dynamic perturbation-adaptive adversarial training (DPAAT) method, which placed AT in a dynamic learning environment to generate adaptive data-level perturbations and provided a dynamically updated criterion by loss information collections to handle the disadvantage of fixed perturbation sizes in conventional AT methods and the dependence on external transference. Comprehensive testing on dermatology HAM10000 dataset showed that the DPAAT not only achieved better robustness improvement and generalization preservation but also significantly enhanced mean average precision and interpretability on various CNNs, indicating its great potential as a generic adversarial training method on the MIC.

The long-tail recommendation is a challenging task for traditional recommender systems, due to data sparsity and data imbalance issues. The recent development of large language models (LLMs) has shown their abilities in complex reasoning, which can help to deduce users' preferences based on very few previous interactions. However, since most LLM-based systems rely on items' semantic meaning as the sole evidence for reasoning, the collaborative information of user-item interactions is neglected, which can cause the LLM's reasoning to be misaligned with task-specific collaborative information of the dataset. To further align LLMs' reasoning to task-specific user-item interaction knowledge, we introduce collaborative retrieval-augmented LLMs, CoRAL, which directly incorporate collaborative evidence into the prompts. Based on the retrieved user-item interactions, the LLM can analyze shared and distinct preferences among users, and summarize the patterns indicating which types of users would be attracted by certain items. The retrieved collaborative evidence prompts the LLM to align its reasoning with the user-item interaction patterns in the dataset. However, since the capacity of the input prompt is limited, finding the minimally-sufficient collaborative information for recommendation tasks can be challenging. We propose to find the optimal interaction set through a sequential decision-making process and develop a retrieval policy learned through a reinforcement learning (RL) framework, CoRAL. Our experimental results show that CoRAL can significantly improve LLMs' reasoning abilities on specific recommendation tasks. Our analysis also reveals that CoRAL can more efficiently explore collaborative information through reinforcement learning.

The transition from fetal to extra-uterine life is characterized by a series of respiratory, cardiovascular and metabolic adaptation mechanisms. Approximately 90% of newborns breathe spontaneously without the need for interventions, the remaining 10% will need assistance at birth. Among the latter, most will start breathing after the first assistance maneuvers (drying, tactile stimulation, alignment of the airways); 5% thanks to the application of positive pressure ventilation (PPV). Estimates of intubation rates vary between 0.4% and 2%; less than 0.3% will require chest compression and approximately 0.05% will need medication [1, 4, 5, 15, 16]. Neonatal mortality in Italy, for babies born after the 22nd week of gestational age, is estimated as 1.7 deaths per 1000 births, compared to an average 2.1/1000 in Europe [11]. The inability of some infants to establish and sustain spontaneous or adequate breathing, contributes significantly to these early deaths and also to the burden of adverse neurological outcomes among survivors.

New software and updates are downloaded by end users every day. Each dowloaded software has associated with it an End Users License Agreements (EULA), but this is rarely read. An EULA includes information to avoid legal repercussions. However,this proposes a host of potential problems such as spyware or producing an unwanted affect in the target system. End users do not read these EULA's because of length of the document and users find it extremely difficult to understand. Text summarization is one of the relevant solution to these kind of problems. This require a solution which can summarize the EULA and classify the EULA as "Benign" or "Malicious". We propose a solution in which we have summarize the EULA and classify the EULA as "Benign" or "Malicious". We extract EULA text of different sofware's then we classify the text using eight different supervised classifiers. we use ensemble learning to classify the EULA as benign or malicious using five different text summarization methods. An accuracy of $95.8$\% shows the effectiveness of the presented approach.

Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) is at the core of training modern large machine learning models, providing a scheme for learning powerful representations that can be used in a variety of downstream tasks. However, SSL strategies must be adapted to the type of training data and downstream tasks required. We propose RS3L, a novel simulation-based SSL strategy that employs a method of re-simulation to drive data augmentation for contrastive learning. By intervening in the middle of the simulation process and re-running simulation components downstream of the intervention, we generate multiple realizations of an event, thus producing a set of augmentations covering all physics-driven variations available in the simulator. Using experiments from high-energy physics, we explore how this strategy may enable the development of a foundation model; we show how R3SL pre-training enables powerful performance in downstream tasks such as discrimination of a variety of objects and uncertainty mitigation. In addition to our results, we make the RS3L dataset publicly available for further studies on how to improve SSL strategies.

We revisit the problem of online learning with individual fairness, where an online learner strives to maximize predictive accuracy while ensuring that similar individuals are treated similarly. We first extend the frameworks of Gillen et al. (2018); Bechavod et al. (2020), which rely on feedback from human auditors regarding fairness violations, as we consider auditing schemes that are capable of aggregating feedback from any number of auditors, using a rich class we term monotone aggregation functions. We then prove a characterization for such auditing schemes, practically reducing the analysis of auditing for individual fairness by multiple auditors to that of auditing by (instance-specific) single auditors. Using our generalized framework, we present an oracle-efficient algorithm achieving an upper bound frontier of $(\mathcal{O}(T^{1/2+2b}),\mathcal{O}(T^{3/4-b}))$ respectively for regret, number of fairness violations, for $0\leq b \leq 1/4$. We then study an online classification setting where label feedback is available for positively-predicted individuals only, and present an oracle-efficient algorithm achieving an upper bound frontier of $(\mathcal{O}(T^{2/3+2b}),\mathcal{O}(T^{5/6-b}))$ for regret, number of fairness violations, for $0\leq b \leq 1/6$. In both settings, our algorithms improve on the best known bounds for oracle-efficient algorithms. Furthermore, our algorithms offer significant improvements in computational efficiency, greatly reducing the number of required calls to an (offline) optimization oracle per round, to $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\alpha^{-2})$ in the full information setting, and $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\alpha^{-2} + k^2T^{1/3})$ in the partial information setting, where $\alpha$ is the sensitivity for reporting fairness violations, and $k$ is the number of individuals in a round.

Human-annotated vision datasets inevitably contain a fraction of human mislabelled examples. While the detrimental effects of such mislabelling on supervised learning are well-researched, their influence on Supervised Contrastive Learning (SCL) remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we show that human-labelling errors not only differ significantly from synthetic label errors, but also pose unique challenges in SCL, different to those in traditional supervised learning methods. Specifically, our results indicate they adversely impact the learning process in the ~99% of cases when they occur as false positive samples. Existing noise-mitigating methods primarily focus on synthetic label errors and tackle the unrealistic setting of very high synthetic noise rates (40-80%), but they often underperform on common image datasets due to overfitting. To address this issue, we introduce a novel SCL objective with robustness to human-labelling errors, SCL-RHE. SCL-RHE is designed to mitigate the effects of real-world mislabelled examples, typically characterized by much lower noise rates (<5%). We demonstrate that SCL-RHE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art representation learning and noise-mitigating methods across various vision benchmarks, by offering improved resilience against human-labelling errors.

Edge perturbation is a basic method to modify graph structures. It can be categorized into two veins based on their effects on the performance of graph neural networks (GNNs), i.e., graph data augmentation and attack. Surprisingly, both veins of edge perturbation methods employ the same operations, yet yield opposite effects on GNNs' accuracy. A distinct boundary between these methods in using edge perturbation has never been clearly defined. Consequently, inappropriate perturbations may lead to undesirable outcomes, necessitating precise adjustments to achieve desired effects. Therefore, questions of ``why edge perturbation has a two-faced effect?'' and ``what makes edge perturbation flexible and effective?'' still remain unanswered. In this paper, we will answer these questions by proposing a unified formulation and establishing a clear boundary between two categories of edge perturbation methods. Specifically, we conduct experiments to elucidate the differences and similarities between these methods and theoretically unify the workflow of these methods by casting it to one optimization problem. Then, we devise Edge Priority Detector (EPD) to generate a novel priority metric, bridging these methods up in the workflow. Experiments show that EPD can make augmentation or attack flexibly and achieve comparable or superior performance to other counterparts with less time overhead.

This work showcases our team's (The BEEGees) contributions to the 2023 George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenge. The aim was to predict neurological recovery from coma following cardiac arrest using clinical data and time-series such as multi-channel EEG and ECG signals. Our modelling approach is multimodal, based on two-dimensional spectrogram representations derived from numerous EEG channels, alongside the integration of clinical data and features extracted directly from EEG recordings. Our submitted model achieved a Challenge score of $0.53$ on the hidden test set for predictions made $72$ hours after return of spontaneous circulation. Our study shows the efficacy and limitations of employing transfer learning in medical classification. With regard to prospective implementation, our analysis reveals that the performance of the model is strongly linked to the selection of a decision threshold and exhibits strong variability across data splits.

Machine learning requires defining one's target variable for predictions or decisions, a process that can have profound implications on fairness: biases are often encoded in target variable definition itself, before any data collection or training. We present an interactive simulator, FairTargetSim (FTS), that illustrates how target variable definition impacts fairness. FTS is a valuable tool for algorithm developers, researchers, and non-technical stakeholders. FTS uses a case study of algorithmic hiring, using real-world data and user-defined target variables. FTS is open-source and available at: http://tinyurl.com/ftsinterface. The video accompanying this paper is here: http://tinyurl.com/ijcaifts.