Image colorization is the process of colorizing grayscale images or recoloring an already-color image. This image manipulation can be used for grayscale satellite, medical and historical images making them more expressive. With the help of the increasing computation power of deep learning techniques, the colorization algorithms results are becoming more realistic in such a way that human eyes cannot differentiate between natural and colorized images. However, this poses a potential security concern, as forged or illegally manipulated images can be used illegally. There is a growing need for effective detection methods to distinguish between natural color and computer-colorized images. This paper presents a novel approach that combines the advantages of transfer and ensemble learning approaches to help reduce training time and resource requirements while proposing a model to classify natural color and computer-colorized images. The proposed model uses pre-trained branches VGG16 and Resnet50, along with Mobile Net v2 or Efficientnet feature vectors. The proposed model showed promising results, with accuracy ranging from 94.55% to 99.13% and very low Half Total Error Rate values. The proposed model outperformed existing state-of-the-art models regarding classification performance and generalization capabilities.

In ski jumping, low repetition rates of jumps limit the effectiveness of training. Thus, increasing learning rate within every single jump is key to success. A critical element of athlete training is motor learning, which has been shown to be accelerated by feedback methods. In particular, a fine-grained control of the center of gravity in the in-run is essential. This is because the actual takeoff occurs within a blink of an eye ($\sim$300ms), thus any unbalanced body posture during the in-run will affect flight. This paper presents a smart, compact, and energy-efficient wireless sensor system for real-time performance analysis and biofeedback during ski jumping. The system operates by gauging foot pressures at three distinct points on the insoles of the ski boot at 100Hz. Foot pressure data can either be directly sent to coaches to improve their feedback, or fed into a ML model to give athletes instantaneous in-action feedback using a vibration motor in the ski boot. In the biofeedback scenario, foot pressures act as input variables for an optimized XGBoost model. We achieve a high predictive accuracy of 92.7% for center of mass predictions (dorsal shift, neutral stand, ventral shift). Subsequently, we parallelized and fine-tuned our XGBoost model for a RISC-V based low power parallel processor (GAP9), based on the PULP architecture. We demonstrate real-time detection and feedback (0.0109ms/inference) using our on-chip deployment. The proposed smart system is unobtrusive with a slim form factor (13mm baseboard, 3.2mm antenna) and a lightweight build (26g). Power consumption analysis reveals that the system's energy-efficient design enables sustained operation over multiple days (up to 300 hours) without requiring recharge.

The biggest Breast cancer is increasingly a major factor in female fatalities, overtaking heart disease. While genetic factors are important in the growth of breast cancer, new research indicates that environmental factors also play a substantial role in its occurrence and progression. The literature on the various environmental factors that may affect breast cancer risk, incidence, and outcomes is thoroughly reviewed in this study report. The study starts by looking at how lifestyle decisions, such as eating habits, exercise routines, and alcohol consumption, may affect hormonal imbalances and inflammation, two important factors driving the development of breast cancer. Additionally, it explores the part played by environmental contaminants such pesticides, endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), and industrial emissions, all of which have been linked to a higher risk of developing breast cancer due to their interference with hormone signaling and DNA damage. Algorithms for machine learning are used to express predictions. Logistic Regression, Random Forest, KNN Algorithm, SVC and extra tree classifier. Metrics including the confusion matrix correlation coefficient, F1-score, Precision, Recall, and ROC curve were used to evaluate the models. The best accuracy among all the classifiers is Random Forest with 0.91% accuracy and ROC curve 0.901% of Logistic Regression. The accuracy of the multiple algorithms for machine learning utilized in this research was good, which is important and indicates that these techniques could serve as replacement forecasting techniques in breast cancer survival analysis, notably in the Asia region.

User churn, characterized by customers ending their relationship with a business, has profound economic consequences across various Business-to-Customer scenarios. For numerous system-to-user actions, such as promotional discounts and retention campaigns, predicting potential churners stands as a primary objective. In volatile sectors like fantasy sports, unpredictable factors such as international sports events can influence even regular spending habits. Consequently, while transaction history and user-product interaction are valuable in predicting churn, they demand deep domain knowledge and intricate feature engineering. Additionally, feature development for churn prediction systems can be resource-intensive, particularly in production settings serving 200m+ users, where inference pipelines largely focus on feature engineering. This paper conducts an exhaustive study on predicting user churn using historical data. We aim to create a model forecasting customer churn likelihood, facilitating businesses in comprehending attrition trends and formulating effective retention plans. Our approach treats churn prediction as multivariate time series classification, demonstrating that combining user activity and deep neural networks yields remarkable results for churn prediction in complex business-to-customer contexts.

Background: With the ever-increasing amount of medical imaging data, the demand for algorithms to assist clinicians has amplified. Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) models promise to aid in the crucial first step of disease detection. While previous studies have thoroughly explored fairness in supervised models in healthcare, for UAD, this has so far been unexplored. Methods: In this study, we evaluated how dataset composition regarding subgroups manifests in disparate performance of UAD models along multiple protected variables on three large-scale publicly available chest X-ray datasets. Our experiments were validated using two state-of-the-art UAD models for medical images. Finally, we introduced a novel subgroup-AUROC (sAUROC) metric, which aids in quantifying fairness in machine learning. Findings: Our experiments revealed empirical "fairness laws" (similar to "scaling laws" for Transformers) for training-dataset composition: Linear relationships between anomaly detection performance within a subpopulation and its representation in the training data. Our study further revealed performance disparities, even in the case of balanced training data, and compound effects that exacerbate the drop in performance for subjects associated with multiple adversely affected groups. Interpretation: Our study quantified the disparate performance of UAD models against certain demographic subgroups. Importantly, we showed that this unfairness cannot be mitigated by balanced representation alone. Instead, the representation of some subgroups seems harder to learn by UAD models than that of others. The empirical fairness laws discovered in our study make disparate performance in UAD models easier to estimate and aid in determining the most desirable dataset composition.

The challenge task is about training a sound event detection system using the soft labels, to investigate if leveraging information Classification systems are normally trained by minimizing the from the soft labels is beneficial for the acoustic models. However, cross-entropy between system outputs and reference labels, which the evaluation is done using hard labels and hard metrics. Converting makes the Kullback-Leibler divergence a natural choice for measuring soft labels into binary requires choosing a threshold value, and how closely the system can follow the data. Non-binary references finding a good one is not a trivial task. The most straightforward can arise from various sources, and it is often beneficial to use way is to use 0.5 as the threshold, and this is also how the reference the soft labels for training instead of the binarized data. In addition data for the challenge is binarized. However, as a consequence, six to the cross-entropy based measures, precision and recall provide event classes out of 17 are left out from the evaluation, as there are another perspective for measuring the performance of a classification not enough segments with a soft label value above the threshold.

Jinsook Lee, Chris Brooks, Renzhe Yu, Rene Kizilcec To measure bias, we encourage teams to consider using AUC Gap: the absolute difference between the highest and lowest test AUC for subgroups (e.g., gender, race, SES, prior knowledge). It is agnostic to the AI/ML algorithm used and it captures the disparity in model performance for any number of subgroups, which enables non-binary fairness assessments such as for intersectional identity groups. The teams use a wide range of AI/ML models in pursuit of a common goal of doubling math achievement in low-income middle schools. Ensuring that the models, which are trained on datasets collected in many different contexts, do not introduce or amplify biases is important for achieving the goal. We offer here a versatile and easy-to-compute measure of model bias for all teams in order to create a common benchmark and an analytical basis for sharing what strategies have worked for different teams.

We propose FLARE, the first fingerprinting mechanism to verify whether a suspected Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) policy is an illegitimate copy of another (victim) policy. We first show that it is possible to find non-transferable, universal adversarial masks, i.e., perturbations, to generate adversarial examples that can successfully transfer from a victim policy to its modified versions but not to independently trained policies. FLARE employs these masks as fingerprints to verify the true ownership of stolen DRL policies by measuring an action agreement value over states perturbed by such masks. Our empirical evaluations show that FLARE is effective (100% action agreement on stolen copies) and does not falsely accuse independent policies (no false positives). FLARE is also robust to model modification attacks and cannot be easily evaded by more informed adversaries without negatively impacting agent performance. We also show that not all universal adversarial masks are suitable candidates for fingerprints due to the inherent characteristics of DRL policies. The spatio-temporal dynamics of DRL problems and sequential decision-making process make characterizing the decision boundary of DRL policies more difficult, as well as searching for universal masks that capture the geometry of it.

The problem of revealing botnet activity through Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) detection seems to be solved, considering that available deep learning classifiers achieve accuracies of over 99.9%. However, these classifiers provide a false sense of security as they are heavily biased and allow for trivial detection bypass. In this work, we leverage explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods to analyze the reasoning of deep learning classifiers and to systematically reveal such biases. We show that eliminating these biases from DGA classifiers considerably deteriorates their performance. Nevertheless we are able to design a context-aware detection system that is free of the identified biases and maintains the detection rate of state-of-the art deep learning classifiers. In this context, we propose a visual analysis system that helps to better understand a classifier's reasoning, thereby increasing trust in and transparency of detection methods and facilitating decision-making.

The out-of-distribution (OOD) problem generally arises when neural networks encounter data that significantly deviates from the training data distribution, i.e., in-distribution (InD). In this paper, we study the OOD problem from a neuron activation view. We first formulate neuron activation states by considering both the neuron output and its influence on model decisions. Then, to characterize the relationship between neurons and OOD issues, we introduce the \textit{neuron activation coverage} (NAC) -- a simple measure for neuron behaviors under InD data. Leveraging our NAC, we show that 1) InD and OOD inputs can be largely separated based on the neuron behavior, which significantly eases the OOD detection problem and beats the 21 previous methods over three benchmarks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-1K). 2) a positive correlation between NAC and model generalization ability consistently holds across architectures and datasets, which enables a NAC-based criterion for evaluating model robustness. Compared to prevalent InD validation criteria, we show that NAC not only can select more robust models, but also has a stronger correlation with OOD test performance.