To enhance therapeutic outcomes from a pharmacological perspective, we propose MiranDa, designed for medication recommendation, which is the first actionable model capable of providing the estimated length of stay in hospitals (ELOS) as counterfactual outcomes that guide clinical practice and model training. In detail, MiranDa emulates the educational trajectory of doctors through two gradient-scaling phases shifted by ELOS: an Evidence-based Training Phase that utilizes supervised learning and a Therapeutic Optimization Phase grounds in reinforcement learning within the gradient space, explores optimal medications by perturbations from ELOS. Evaluation of the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III dataset and IV dataset, showcased the superior results of our model across five metrics, particularly in reducing the ELOS. Surprisingly, our model provides structural attributes of medication combinations proved in hyperbolic space and advocated "procedure-specific" medication combinations. These findings posit that MiranDa enhanced medication efficacy. Notably, our paradigm can be applied to nearly all medical tasks and those with information to evaluate predicted outcomes. The source code of the MiranDa model is available at https://github.com/azusakou/MiranDa.

This paper addresses the challenge of robotic grasping of general objects. Similar to prior research, the task reads a single-view 3D observation (i.e., point clouds) captured by a depth camera as input. Crucially, the success of object grasping highly demands a comprehensive understanding of the shape of objects within the scene. However, single-view observations often suffer from occlusions (including both self and inter-object occlusions), which lead to gaps in the point clouds, especially in complex cluttered scenes. This renders incomplete perception of the object shape and frequently causes failures or inaccurate pose estimation during object grasping. In this paper, we tackle this issue with an effective albeit simple solution, namely completing grasping-related scene regions through local occupancy prediction. Following prior practice, the proposed model first runs by proposing a number of most likely grasp points in the scene. Around each grasp point, a module is designed to infer any voxel in its neighborhood to be either void or occupied by some object. Importantly, the occupancy map is inferred by fusing both local and global cues. We implement a multi-group tri-plane scheme for efficiently aggregating long-distance contextual information. The model further estimates 6-DoF grasp poses utilizing the local occupancy-enhanced object shape information and returns the top-ranked grasp proposal. Comprehensive experiments on both the large-scale GraspNet-1Billion benchmark and real robotic arm demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively complete the unobserved parts in cluttered and occluded scenes. Benefiting from the occupancy-enhanced feature, our model clearly outstrips other competing methods under various performance metrics such as grasping average precision.

AI-Driven Fast and Early Detection of IoT Botnet Threats: A Comprehensive Network Traffic Analysis Approach Abdelaziz Amara korba 1,2, Aleddine Diaf 1, and Y acine Ghamri-Doudane 2 1 LRS, Badji Mokhtar University of Annaba, Algeria 2 L3I, University of La Rochelle, France Abstract --In the rapidly evolving landscape of cyber threats targeting the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, and in light of the surge in botnet-driven Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and brute force attacks, this study focuses on the early detection of IoT bots. It specifically addresses the detection of stealth bot communication that precedes and orchestrates attacks. This study proposes a comprehensive methodology for analyzing IoT network traffic, including considerations for both unidirectional and bidirectional flow, as well as packet formats. It explores a wide spectrum of network features critical for representing network traffic and characterizing benign IoT traffic patterns effectively. Moreover, it delves into the modeling of traffic using various semi-supervised learning techniques. Through extensive experimentation with the IoT -23 dataset--a comprehensive collection featuring diverse botnet types and traffic scenarios--we have demonstrated the feasibility of detecting botnet traffic corresponding to different operations and types of bots, specifically focusing on stealth command and control (C2) communications.The results obtained have demonstrated the feasibility of identifying C2 communication with a 100% success rate through packet-based methods and 94% via flow-based approaches, with a false positive rate of 1.53%.

Progress in machine understanding of sign languages has been slow and hampered by limited data. In this paper, we present FSboard, an American Sign Language fingerspelling dataset situated in a mobile text entry use case, collected from 147 paid and consenting Deaf signers using Pixel 4A selfie cameras in a variety of environments. Fingerspelling recognition is an incomplete solution that is only one small part of sign language translation, but it could provide some immediate benefit to Deaf/Hard of Hearing signers as more broadly capable technology develops. At >3 million characters in length and >250 hours in duration, FSboard is the largest fingerspelling recognition dataset to date by a factor of >10x. As a simple baseline, we finetune 30 Hz MediaPipe Holistic landmark inputs into ByT5-Small and achieve 11.1% Character Error Rate (CER) on a test set with unique phrases and signers. This quality degrades gracefully when decreasing frame rate and excluding face/body landmarks: plausible optimizations to help models run on device in real time.

Without direct access to the client's data, federated learning (FL) is well-known for its unique strength in data privacy protection among existing distributed machine learning techniques. However, its distributive and iterative nature makes FL inherently vulnerable to various poisoning attacks. To counteract these threats, extensive defenses have been proposed to filter out malicious clients, using various detection metrics. Based on our analysis of existing attacks and defenses, we find that there is a lack of attention to model redundancy. In neural networks, various model parameters contribute differently to the model's performance. However, existing attacks in FL manipulate all the model update parameters with the same strategy, making them easily detectable by common defenses. Meanwhile, the defenses also tend to analyze the overall statistical features of the entire model updates, leaving room for sophisticated attacks. Based on these observations, this paper proposes a generic and attack-agnostic augmentation approach designed to enhance the effectiveness and stealthiness of existing FL poisoning attacks against detection in FL, pointing out the inherent flaws of existing defenses and exposing the necessity of fine-grained FL security. Specifically, we employ a three-stage methodology that strategically constructs, generates, and injects poison (generated by existing attacks) into a pill (a tiny subnet with a novel structure) during the FL training, named as pill construction, pill poisoning, and pill injection accordingly. Extensive experimental results show that FL poisoning attacks enhanced by our method can bypass all the popular defenses, and can gain an up to 7x error rate increase, as well as on average a more than 2x error rate increase on both IID and non-IID data, in both cross-silo and cross-device FL systems.

Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC) commonly lacks large-scale high-quality corpora, due to the labor-intensive labeling of spelling errors in real-life human writing or typing scenarios. Two data augmentation methods are widely adopted: (1) Random Replacement with the guidance of confusion sets and (2) OCR/ASRbased Generation that simulates character misusing. However, both methods inevitably introduce noisy data (e.g., false spelling errors), potentially leading to over-correction. By carefully analyzing the two types of corpora, we find that though the latter achieves more robust generalization performance, the former yields better-calibrated CSC models. We then provide a theoretical analysis of this empirical observation, based on which a corpus refining strategy is proposed. Specifically, OCR/ASR-based Figure 1: Calibration curves and performance of BERTbased data samples are fed into a well-calibrated CSC CSC models trained on random replacement and model trained on random replacement-based OCR/ASR-based data. ECE means the metric of Expected corpora and then filtered based on prediction Calibration Error (Guo et al., 2017), and FPR confidence. By learning a simple BERT-based means the sentence-level false positive rate that measures model on the refined OCR/ASR-based corpus, over-corrections. Combing subplots (a), (b), and we set up impressive state-of-the-art performance (c), OCR/ASR-based data produce better performances on three widely-used benchmarks, while on standard metrics (e.g., P, R, and F1), while random significantly alleviating over-correction (e.g., replacement yields better calibration and FPR.

Feature selection poses a challenge in small-sample high-dimensional datasets, where the number of features exceeds the number of observations, as seen in microarray, gene expression, and medical datasets. There isn't a universally optimal feature selection method applicable to any data distribution, and as a result, the literature consistently endeavors to address this issue. One recent approach in feature selection is termed frequency-based feature selection. However, existing methods in this domain tend to overlook feature values, focusing solely on the distribution in the response variable. In response, this paper introduces the Distance-based Mutual Congestion (DMC) as a filter method that considers both the feature values and the distribution of observations in the response variable. DMC sorts the features of datasets, and the top 5% are retained and clustered by KMeans to mitigate multicollinearity. This is achieved by randomly selecting one feature from each cluster. The selected features form the feature space, and the search space for the Genetic Algorithm with Adaptive Rates (GAwAR) will be approximated using this feature space. GAwAR approximates the combination of the top 10 features that maximizes prediction accuracy within a wrapper scheme. To prevent premature convergence, GAwAR adaptively updates the crossover and mutation rates. The hybrid DMC-GAwAR is applicable to binary classification datasets, and experimental results demonstrate its superiority over some recent works. The implementation and corresponding data are available at https://github.com/hnematzadeh/DMC-GAwAR

Hallucination, a phenomenon where large language models (LLMs) produce output that is factually incorrect or unrelated to the input, is a major challenge for LLM applications that require accuracy and dependability. In this paper, we introduce a reliable and high-speed production system aimed at detecting and rectifying the hallucination issue within LLMs. Our system encompasses named entity recognition (NER), natural language inference (NLI), span-based detection (SBD), and an intricate decision tree-based process to reliably detect a wide range of hallucinations in LLM responses. Furthermore, our team has crafted a rewriting mechanism that maintains an optimal mix of precision, response time, and cost-effectiveness. We detail the core elements of our framework and underscore the paramount challenges tied to response time, availability, and performance metrics, which are crucial for real-world deployment of these technologies. Our extensive evaluation, utilizing offline data and live production traffic, confirms the efficacy of our proposed framework and service.

Text embedding models have been popular for information retrieval applications such as semantic search and Question-Answering systems based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Those models are typically Transformer models that are fine-tuned with contrastive learning objectives. Many papers introduced new embedding model architectures and training approaches, however, one of the key ingredients, the process of mining negative passages, remains poorly explored or described. One of the challenging aspects of fine-tuning embedding models is the selection of high quality hard-negative passages for contrastive learning. In this paper we propose a family of positive-aware mining methods that leverage the positive relevance score for more effective false negatives removal. We also provide a comprehensive ablation study on hard-negative mining methods over their configurations, exploring different teacher and base models. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed methods by introducing the NV-Retriever-v1 model, which scores 60.9 on MTEB Retrieval (BEIR) benchmark and 0.65 points higher than previous methods. The model placed 1st when it was published to MTEB Retrieval on July 07, 2024.

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) and awareness around multilingual LLMs have raised concerns regarding the potential risks and repercussions linked to the misapplication of AI-generated text, necessitating increased vigilance. While these models are primarily trained for English, their extensive training on vast datasets covering almost the entire web, equips them with capabilities to perform well in numerous other languages. AI-Generated Text Detection (AGTD) has emerged as a topic that has already received immediate attention in research, with some initial methods having been proposed, soon followed by the emergence of techniques to bypass detection. In this paper, we report our investigation on AGTD for an indic language Hindi. Our major contributions are in four folds: i) examined 26 LLMs to evaluate their proficiency in generating Hindi text, ii) introducing the AI-generated news article in Hindi ($AG_{hi}$) dataset, iii) evaluated the effectiveness of five recently proposed AGTD techniques: ConDA, J-Guard, RADAR, RAIDAR and Intrinsic Dimension Estimation for detecting AI-generated Hindi text, iv) proposed Hindi AI Detectability Index ($ADI_{hi}$) which shows a spectrum to understand the evolving landscape of eloquence of AI-generated text in Hindi. We will make the codes and datasets available to encourage further research.