Performance testing aims at uncovering efficiency issues of software systems. In order to be both effective and practical, the design of a performance test must achieve a reasonable trade-off between result quality and testing time. This becomes particularly challenging in Java context, where the software undergoes a warm-up phase of execution, due to just-in-time compilation. During this phase, performance measurements are subject to severe fluctuations, which may adversely affect quality of performance test results. However, these approaches often provide suboptimal estimates of the warm-up phase, resulting in either insufficient or excessive warm-up iterations, which may degrade result quality or increase testing time. There is still a lack of consensus on how to properly address this problem. Here, we propose and study an AI-based framework to dynamically halt warm-up iterations at runtime. Specifically, our framework leverages recent advances in AI for Time Series Classification (TSC) to predict the end of the warm-up phase during test execution. We conduct experiments by training three different TSC models on half a million of measurement segments obtained from JMH microbenchmark executions. We find that our framework significantly improves the accuracy of the warm-up estimates provided by state-of-practice and state-of-the-art methods. This higher estimation accuracy results in a net improvement in either result quality or testing time for up to +35.3% of the microbenchmarks. Our study highlights that integrating AI to dynamically estimate the end of the warm-up phase can enhance the cost-effectiveness of Java performance testing.

Annotation errors are a challenge not only during training of machine learning models, but also during their evaluation. Label variations and inaccuracies in datasets often manifest as contradictory examples that deviate from established labeling conventions. Such inconsistencies, when significant, prevent models from achieving optimal performance on metrics such as mean Average Precision (mAP). We introduce the notion of "label convergence" to describe the highest achievable performance under the constraint of contradictory test annotations, essentially defining an upper bound on model accuracy. Recognizing that noise is an inherent characteristic of all data, our study analyzes five real-world datasets, including the LVIS dataset, to investigate the phenomenon of label convergence. We approximate that label convergence is between 62.63-67.52 mAP@[0.5:0.95:0.05] for LVIS with 95% confidence, attributing these bounds to the presence of real annotation errors. With current state-of-the-art (SOTA) models at the upper end of the label convergence interval for the well-studied LVIS dataset, we conclude that model capacity is sufficient to solve current object detection problems. Therefore, future efforts should focus on three key aspects: (1) updating the problem specification and adjusting evaluation practices to account for unavoidable label noise, (2) creating cleaner data, especially test data, and (3) including multi-annotated data to investigate annotation variation and make these issues visible from the outset.

Decoding neurophysiological signals into language is of great research interest within brain-computer interface (BCI) applications. Electroencephalography (EEG), known for its non-invasiveness, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness, has been a popular method in this field. However, current EEG-to-Text decoding approaches face challenges due to the huge domain gap between EEG recordings and raw texts, inherent data bias, and small closed vocabularies. In this paper, we propose SEE: Semantically Aligned EEG-to-Text Translation, a novel method aimed at improving EEG-to-Text decoding by seamlessly integrating two modules into a pre-trained BART language model. These two modules include (1) a Cross-Modal Codebook that learns cross-modal representations to enhance feature consolidation and mitigate domain gap, and (2) a Semantic Matching Module that fully utilizes pre-trained text representations to align multi-modal features extracted from EEG-Text pairs while considering noise caused by false negatives, i.e., data from different EEG-Text pairs that have similar semantic meanings. Experimental results on the Zurich Cognitive Language Processing Corpus (ZuCo) demonstrate the effectiveness of SEE, which enhances the feasibility of accurate EEG-to-Text decoding.

Gathering histopathology slides from over 100 publicly available cohorts, we compile a diverse dataset of 460 million pathology tiles covering more than 30 cancer sites. Using this dataset, we train a large self-supervised vision transformer using DINOv2 and publicly release one iteration of this model for further experimentation, coined Phikon-v2. While trained on publicly available histology slides, Phikon-v2 surpasses our previously released model (Phikon) and performs on par with other histopathology foundation models (FM) trained on proprietary data. Our benchmarks include eight slide-level tasks with results reported on external validation cohorts avoiding any data contamination between pre-training and evaluation datasets. Our downstream training procedure follows a simple yet robust ensembling strategy yielding a +1.75 AUC increase across tasks and models compared to one-shot retraining (p<0.001). We compare Phikon (ViT-B) and Phikon-v2 (ViT-L) against 14 different histology feature extractors, making our evaluation the most comprehensive to date. Our result support evidences that DINOv2 handles joint model and data scaling better than iBOT. Also, we show that recent scaling efforts are overall beneficial to downstream performance in the context of biomarker prediction with GigaPath and H-Optimus-0 (two ViT-g with 1.1B parameters each) standing out. However, the statistical margins between the latest top-performing FMs remain mostly non-significant; some even underperform on specific indications or tasks such as MSI prediction - deposed by a 13x smaller model developed internally. While latest foundation models may exhibit limitations for clinical deployment, they nonetheless offer excellent grounds for the development of more specialized and cost-efficient histology encoders fueling AI-guided diagnostic tools.

Detecting and classifying suspicious or malicious domain names and URLs is fundamental task in cybersecurity. To leverage such indicators of compromise, cybersecurity vendors and practitioners often maintain and update blacklists of known malicious domains and URLs. However, blacklists frequently fail to identify emerging and obfuscated threats. Over the past few decades, there has been significant interest in developing machine learning models that automatically detect malicious domains and URLs, addressing the limitations of blacklists maintenance and updates. In this paper, we introduce DomURLs_BERT, a pre-trained BERT-based encoder adapted for detecting and classifying suspicious/malicious domains and URLs. DomURLs_BERT is pre-trained using the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) objective on a large multilingual corpus of URLs, domain names, and Domain Generation Algorithms (DGA) dataset. In order to assess the performance of DomURLs_BERT, we have conducted experiments on several binary and multi-class classification tasks involving domain names and URLs, covering phishing, malware, DGA, and DNS tunneling. The evaluations results show that the proposed encoder outperforms state-of-the-art character-based deep learning models and cybersecurity-focused BERT models across multiple tasks and datasets. The pre-training dataset, the pre-trained DomURLs_BERT encoder, and the experiments source code are publicly available.

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini have significantly advanced natural language processing, enabling various applications such as chatbots and automated content generation. However, these models can be exploited by malicious individuals who craft toxic prompts to elicit harmful or unethical responses. These individuals often employ jailbreaking techniques to bypass safety mechanisms, highlighting the need for robust toxic prompt detection methods. Existing detection techniques, both blackbox and whitebox, face challenges related to the diversity of toxic prompts, scalability, and computational efficiency. In response, we propose ToxicDetector, a lightweight greybox method designed to efficiently detect toxic prompts in LLMs. ToxicDetector leverages LLMs to create toxic concept prompts, uses embedding vectors to form feature vectors, and employs a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) classifier for prompt classification. Our evaluation on various versions of the LLama models, Gemma-2, and multiple datasets demonstrates that ToxicDetector achieves a high accuracy of 96.39\% and a low false positive rate of 2.00\%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, ToxicDetector's processing time of 0.0780 seconds per prompt makes it highly suitable for real-time applications. ToxicDetector achieves high accuracy, efficiency, and scalability, making it a practical method for toxic prompt detection in LLMs.

Early detection of chronic and Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) is crucial for effective treatment during the initial stages. This study explores the application of wearable devices and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in order to predict weight loss changes in overweight and obese individuals. Using wearable data from a 1-month trial involving around 100 subjects from the AI4FoodDB database, including biomarkers, vital signs, and behavioral data, we identify key differences between those achieving weight loss (>= 2% of their initial weight) and those who do not. Feature selection techniques and classification algorithms reveal promising results, with the Gradient Boosting classifier achieving 84.44% Area Under the Curve (AUC). The integration of multiple data sources (e.g., vital signs, physical and sleep activity, etc.) enhances performance, suggesting the potential of wearable devices and AI in personalized healthcare.

The Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSP) is central to operations research, primarily optimizing energy efficiency due to its profound environmental and economic implications. Efficient scheduling enhances production metrics and mitigates energy consumption, thus effectively balancing productivity and sustainability objectives. Given the intricate and diverse nature of JSP instances, along with the array of algorithms developed to tackle these challenges, an intelligent algorithm selection tool becomes paramount. This paper introduces a framework designed to identify key problem features that characterize its complexity and guide the selection of suitable algorithms. Leveraging machine learning techniques, particularly XGBoost, the framework recommends optimal solvers such as GUROBI, CPLEX, and GECODE for efficient JSP scheduling. GUROBI excels with smaller instances, while GECODE demonstrates robust scalability for complex scenarios. The proposed algorithm selector achieves an accuracy of 84.51\% in recommending the best algorithm for solving new JSP instances, highlighting its efficacy in algorithm selection. By refining feature extraction methodologies, the framework aims to broaden its applicability across diverse JSP scenarios, thereby advancing efficiency and sustainability in manufacturing logistics.

Link prediction is a crucial task in network analysis, but it has been shown to be prone to biased predictions, particularly when links are unfairly predicted between nodes from different sensitive groups. In this paper, we study the fair link prediction problem, which aims to ensure that the predicted link probability is independent of the sensitive attributes of the connected nodes. Existing methods typically incorporate debiasing techniques within graph embeddings to mitigate this issue. However, training on large real-world graphs is already challenging, and adding fairness constraints can further complicate the process. To overcome this challenge, we propose FairLink, a method that learns a fairness-enhanced graph to bypass the need for debiasing during the link predictor's training. FairLink maintains link prediction accuracy by ensuring that the enhanced graph follows a training trajectory similar to that of the original input graph. Meanwhile, it enhances fairness by minimizing the absolute difference in link probabilities between node pairs within the same sensitive group and those between node pairs from different sensitive groups. Our extensive experiments on multiple large-scale graphs demonstrate that FairLink not only promotes fairness but also often achieves link prediction accuracy comparable to baseline methods. Most importantly, the enhanced graph exhibits strong generalizability across different GNN architectures.

Demographic bias is one of the major challenges for face recognition systems. The majority of existing studies on demographic biases are heavily dependent on specific demographic groups or demographic classifier, making it difficult to address performance for unrecognised groups. This paper introduces ``LabellessFace'', a novel framework that improves demographic bias in face recognition without requiring demographic group labeling typically required for fairness considerations. We propose a novel fairness enhancement metric called the class favoritism level, which assesses the extent of favoritism towards specific classes across the dataset. Leveraging this metric, we introduce the fair class margin penalty, an extension of existing margin-based metric learning. This method dynamically adjusts learning parameters based on class favoritism levels, promoting fairness across all attributes. By treating each class as an individual in facial recognition systems, we facilitate learning that minimizes biases in authentication accuracy among individuals. Comprehensive experiments have demonstrated that our proposed method is effective for enhancing fairness while maintaining authentication accuracy.