Predicting drug side-effects before they occur is a key task in keeping the number of drug-related hospitalizations low and to improve drug discovery processes. Automatic predictors of side-effects generally are not able to process the structure of the drug, resulting in a loss of information. Graph neural networks have seen great success in recent years, thanks to their ability of exploiting the information conveyed by the graph structure and labels. These models have been used in a wide variety of biological applications, among which the prediction of drug side-effects on a large knowledge graph. Exploiting the molecular graph encoding the structure of the drug represents a novel approach, in which the problem is formulated as a multi-class multi-label graph-focused classification. We developed a methodology to carry out this task, using recurrent Graph Neural Networks, and building a dataset from freely accessible and well established data sources. The results show that our method has an improved classification capability, under many parameters and metrics, with respect to previously available predictors.

Automatic spoken language identification (LID) is a very important research field in the era of multilingual voice-command-based human-computer interaction (HCI). A front-end LID module helps to improve the performance of many speech-based applications in the multilingual scenario. India is a populous country with diverse cultures and languages. The majority of the Indian population needs to use their respective native languages for verbal interaction with machines. Therefore, the development of efficient Indian spoken language recognition systems is useful for adapting smart technologies in every section of Indian society. The field of Indian LID has started gaining momentum in the last two decades, mainly due to the development of several standard multilingual speech corpora for the Indian languages. Even though significant research progress has already been made in this field, to the best of our knowledge, there are not many attempts to analytically review them collectively. In this work, we have conducted one of the very first attempts to present a comprehensive review of the Indian spoken language recognition research field. In-depth analysis has been presented to emphasize the unique challenges of low-resource and mutual influences for developing LID systems in the Indian contexts. Several essential aspects of the Indian LID research, such as the detailed description of the available speech corpora, the major research contributions, including the earlier attempts based on statistical modeling to the recent approaches based on different neural network architectures, and the future research trends are discussed. This review work will help assess the state of the present Indian LID research by any active researcher or any research enthusiasts from related fields.

Oral Food Challenges (OFCs) are essential to accurately diagnosing food allergy due to the limitations of existing clinical testing. However, some patients are hesitant to undergo OFCs, while those willing suffer from limited access to allergists in rural/community healthcare settings. Despite its success in predicting patient outcomes in other clinical settings, few applications of machine learning to food allergy have been developed. Thus, in this study, we seek to leverage machine learning methodologies for OFC outcome prediction. Retrospective data was gathered from 1,112 patients who collectively underwent a total of 1,284 OFCs, and consisted of clinical factors including serum-specific Immunoglobulin E (IgE), total IgE, skin prick tests (SPTs), comorbidities, sex, and age. Using these features, multiple machine learning models were constructed to predict OFC outcomes for three common allergens: peanut, egg, and milk. The best performing model for each allergen was an ensemble of random forest (egg) or Learning Using Concave and Convex Kernels (LUCCK) (peanut, milk) models, which achieved an Area under the Curve (AUC) of 0.91, 0.96, and 0.94, in predicting OFC outcomes for peanut, egg, and milk, respectively. Moreover, all such models had sensitivity and specificity values 89%. Model interpretation via SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) indicates that specific IgE, along with wheal and flare values from SPTs, are highly predictive of OFC outcomes. The results of this analysis suggest that ensemble learning has the potential to predict OFC outcomes and reveal relevant clinical factors for further study.

Detecting sarcasm and verbal irony from people's subjective statements is crucial to understanding their intended meanings and real sentiments and positions in social scenarios. This paper describes the X-PuDu system that participated in SemEval-2022 Task 6, iSarcasmEval - Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic, which aims at detecting intended sarcasm in various settings of natural language understanding. Our solution finetunes pre-trained language models, such as ERNIE-M and DeBERTa, under the multilingual settings to recognize the irony from Arabic and English texts. Our system ranked second out of 43, and ninth out of 32 in Task A: one-sentence detection in English and Arabic; fifth out of 22 in Task B: binary multi-label classification in English; first out of 16, and fifth out of 13 in Task C: sentence-pair detection in English and Arabic.

The fair-ranking problem, which asks to rank a given set of items to maximize utility subject to group fairness constraints, has received attention in the fairness, information retrieval, and machine learning literature. Recent works, however, observe that errors in socially-salient (including protected) attributes of items can significantly undermine fairness guarantees of existing fair-ranking algorithms and raise the problem of mitigating the effect of such errors. We study the fair-ranking problem under a model where socially-salient attributes of items are randomly and independently perturbed. We present a fair-ranking framework that incorporates group fairness requirements along with probabilistic information about perturbations in socially-salient attributes. We provide provable guarantees on the fairness and utility attainable by our framework and show that it is information-theoretically impossible to significantly beat these guarantees. Our framework works for multiple non-disjoint attributes and a general class of fairness constraints that includes proportional and equal representation. Empirically, we observe that, compared to baselines, our algorithm outputs rankings with higher fairness, and has a similar or better fairness-utility trade-off compared to baselines.

Analyzing defenses in team sports is generally challenging because of the limited event data. Researchers have previously proposed methods to evaluate football team defense by predicting the events of ball gain and being attacked using locations of all players and the ball. However, they did not consider the importance of the events, assumed the perfect observation of all 22 players, and did not fully investigated the influence of the diversity (e.g., nationality and sex). Here, we propose a generalized valuation method of defensive teams by score-scaling the predicted probabilities of the events. Using the open-source location data of all players in broadcast video frames in football games of men's Euro 2020 and women's Euro 2022, we investigated the effect of the number of players on the prediction and validated our approach by analyzing the games. Results show that for the predictions of being attacked, scoring, and conceding, all players' information was not necessary, while that of ball gain required information on three to four offensive and defensive players. With game analyses we explained the excellence in defense of finalist teams in Euro 2020. Our approach might be applicable to location data from broadcast video frames in football games.

Data scarcity is a notable problem, especially in the medical domain, due to patient data laws. Therefore, efficient Pre-Training techniques could help in combating this problem. In this paper, we demonstrate that a model trained on the time direction of functional neuro-imaging data could help in any downstream task, for example, classifying diseases from healthy controls in fMRI data. We train a Deep Neural Network on Independent components derived from fMRI data using the Independent component analysis (ICA) technique. It learns time direction in the ICA-based data. This pre-trained model is further trained to classify brain disorders in different datasets. Through various experiments, we have shown that learning time direction helps a model learn some causal relation in fMRI data that helps in faster convergence, and consequently, the model generalizes well in downstream classification tasks even with fewer data records.

Knowledge distillation(KD) is a widely-used technique to train compact models in object detection. However, there is still a lack of study on how to distill between heterogeneous detectors. In this paper, we empirically find that better FPN features from a heterogeneous teacher detector can help the student although their detection heads and label assignments are different. However, directly aligning the feature maps to distill detectors suffers from two problems. First, the difference in feature magnitude between the teacher and the student could enforce overly strict constraints on the student. Second, the FPN stages and channels with large feature magnitude from the teacher model could dominate the gradient of distillation loss, which will overwhelm the effects of other features in KD and introduce much noise. To address the above issues, we propose to imitate features with Pearson Correlation Coefficient to focus on the relational information from the teacher and relax constraints on the magnitude of the features. Our method consistently outperforms the existing detection KD methods and works for both homogeneous and heterogeneous student-teacher pairs. Furthermore, it converges faster. With a powerful MaskRCNN-Swin detector as the teacher, ResNet-50 based RetinaNet and FCOS achieve 41.5% and 43.9% mAP on COCO2017, which are 4.1\% and 4.8\% higher than the baseline, respectively.

The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is an essential tool for researchers that allows them to explore the astronomy and astrophysics scientific literature, but it has yet to exploit recent advances in natural language processing. At ADASS 2021, we introduced astroBERT, a machine learning language model tailored to the text used in astronomy papers in ADS. In this work we: 1. announce the first public release of the astroBERT language model; 2. show how astroBERT improves over existing public language models on astrophysics specific tasks; 3. and detail how ADS plans to harness the unique structure of scientific papers, the citation graph and citation context, to further improve astroBERT.

The recent success and proliferation of machine learning and deep learning have provided powerful tools, which are also utilized for encrypted traffic analysis, classification, and threat detection in computer networks. These methods, neural networks in particular, are often complex and require a huge corpus of training data. Therefore, this paper focuses on collecting a large up-to-date dataset with almost 200 fine-grained service labels and 140 million network flows extended with packet-level metadata. The number of flows is three orders of magnitude higher than in other existing public labeled datasets of encrypted traffic. The number of service labels, which is important to make the problem hard and realistic, is four times higher than in the public dataset with the most class labels. The published dataset is intended as a benchmark for identifying services in encrypted traffic. Service identification can be further extended with the task of "rejecting" unknown services, i.e., the traffic not seen during the training phase. Neural networks offer superior performance for tackling this more challenging problem. To showcase the dataset's usefulness, we implemented a neural network with a multi-modal architecture, which is the state-of-the-art approach, and achieved 97.04% classification accuracy and detected 91.94% of unknown services with 5% false positive rate.