Neural simulation-based inference (SBI) describes an emerging family of methods for Bayesian inference with intractable likelihood functions that use neural networks as surrogate models. Here we introduce sbijax, a Python package that implements a wide variety of state-of-the-art methods in neural simulation-based inference using a user-friendly programming interface. sbijax offers high-level functionality to quickly construct SBI estimators, and compute and visualize posterior distributions with only a few lines of code. In addition, the package provides functionality for conventional approximate Bayesian computation, to compute model diagnostics, and to automatically estimate summary statistics. By virtue of being entirely written in JAX, sbijax is extremely computationally efficient, allowing rapid training of neural networks and executing code automatically in parallel on both CPU and GPU.

Relationships among teachers are known to influence their teaching-related perceptions. We study whether and how teachers' advising relationships (networks) are related to their perceptions of satisfaction, students, and influence over educational policies, recorded as their responses to a questionnaire (item responses). We propose a novel joint model of network and item responses (JNIRM) with correlated latent variables to understand these co-varying ties. This methodology allows the analyst to test and interpret the dependence between a network and item responses. Using JNIRM, we discover that teachers' advising relationships contribute to their perceptions of satisfaction and students more often than their perceptions of influence over educational policies. In addition, we observe that the complementarity principle applies in certain schools, where teachers tend to seek advice from those who are different from them. JNIRM shows superior parameter estimation and model fit over separately modeling the network and item responses with latent variable models.

Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) are essential for protecting computer networks from malicious activities, including Denial of Service (DoS), Probing, User-to-Root (U2R), and Remote-to-Local (R2L) attacks. Without effective NIDS, networks are vulnerable to significant security breaches and data loss. Machine learning techniques provide a promising approach to enhance NIDS by automating threat detection and improving accuracy. In this research, we propose an Enhanced Convolutional Neural Network (EnCNN) for NIDS and evaluate its performance using the KDDCUP'99 dataset. Our methodology includes comprehensive data preprocessing, exploratory data analysis (EDA), and feature engineering. We compare EnCNN with various machine learning algorithms, including Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines (SVM), and ensemble methods like Random Forest, AdaBoost, and Voting Ensemble. The results show that EnCNN significantly improves detection accuracy, with a notable 10% increase over state-of-art approaches. This demonstrates the effectiveness of EnCNN in real-time network intrusion detection, offering a robust solution for identifying and mitigating security threats, and enhancing overall network resilience.

Creation of synthetic data models has represented a significant advancement across diverse scientific fields, but this technology also brings important privacy considerations for users. This work focuses on enhancing a non-parametric copula-based synthetic data generation model, DPNPC, by incorporating Differential Privacy through an Enhanced Fourier Perturbation method. The model generates synthetic data for mixed tabular databases while preserving privacy. We compare DPNPC with three other models (PrivBayes, DP-Copula, and DP-Histogram) across three public datasets, evaluating privacy, utility, and execution time. DPNPC outperforms others in modeling multivariate dependencies, maintaining privacy for small $\epsilon$ values, and reducing training times. However, limitations include the need to assess the model's performance with different encoding methods and consider additional privacy attacks. Future research should address these areas to enhance privacy-preserving synthetic data generation.

One of the most important challenges in the financial and cryptocurrency field is accurately predicting cryptocurrency price trends. Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) is beneficial in addressing this challenge. Cryptocurrency markets, marked by substantial growth and volatility, attract investors and scholars keen on deciphering and forecasting cryptocurrency price movements. The vast and diverse array of data available for such predictions increases the complexity of the task. In our study, we introduce a novel approach termed hard and soft information fusion (HSIF) to enhance the accuracy of cryptocurrency price movement forecasts. The hard information component of our approach encompasses historical price records alongside technical indicators. Complementing this, the soft data component extracts from X (formerly Twitter), encompassing news headlines and tweets about the cryptocurrency. To use this data, we use the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based sentiment analysis method, financial BERT (FinBERT), which performs best. Finally, our model feeds on the information set including processed hard and soft data. We employ the bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) model because processing information in both forward and backward directions can capture long-term dependencies in sequential information. Our empirical findings emphasize the superiority of the HSIF approach over models dependent on single-source data by testing on Bitcoin-related data. By fusing hard and soft information on Bitcoin dataset, our model has about 96.8\% accuracy in predicting price movement. Incorporating information enables our model to grasp the influence of social sentiment on price fluctuations, thereby supplementing the technical analysis-based predictions derived from hard information.

Originally proposed for handling time series data, Auto-regressive Decision Trees (ARDTs) have not yet been explored for language modeling. This paper delves into both the theoretical and practical applications of ARDTs in this new context. We theoretically demonstrate that ARDTs can compute complex functions, such as simulating automata, Turing machines, and sparse circuits, by leveraging "chain-of-thought" computations. Our analysis provides bounds on the size, depth, and computational efficiency of ARDTs, highlighting their surprising computational power. Empirically, we train ARDTs on simple language generation tasks, showing that they can learn to generate coherent and grammatically correct text on par with a smaller Transformer model. Additionally, we show that ARDTs can be used on top of transformer representations to solve complex reasoning tasks. This research reveals the unique computational abilities of ARDTs, aiming to broaden the architectural diversity in language model development.

Attention mechanisms, particularly softmax attention, have been instrumental in the success of transformer-based models such as GPT. However, the quadratic memory complexity of softmax attention with respect to sequence length poses significant challenges for processing longer sequences. We introduce Cottention, a novel attention mechanism that replaces the softmax operation with cosine similarity. By leveraging the properties of cosine similarity and rearranging the attention equation, Cottention achieves native linear memory complexity with respect to sequence length, making it inherently more memory-efficient than softmax attention. We demonstrate that Cottention can be reformulated as a recurrent neural network (RNN) with a finite hidden state, allowing for constant memory usage during inference. We evaluate Cottention on both the bidirectional BERT and causal GPT tasks, demonstrating comparable performance to softmax attention while significantly reducing memory requirements. To ensure efficient computation, we develop a custom CUDA kernel for Cottention. Our results show that Cottention is a promising alternative to softmax attention, enabling the processing of longer sequences without sacrificing performance, due to its native linear memory complexity and ability to maintain a constant memory footprint during inference.

Abstract--In this paper, we depart from the widely-used gradient descent-based hierarchical federated learning (FL) algorithms to develop a novel hierarchical FL framework based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Within this framework, we propose two novel FL algorithms, which both use ADMM in the top layer: one that employs ADMM in the lower layer and another that uses the conventional gradient descentbased approach. The proposed framework enhances privacy, and experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithms compared to the conventional algorithms in terms Figure 1: Modular schematic of FL algorithms of learning convergence and accuracy. This conventional approach reveals the entire knowledge of the model by directly transmitting its Federated learning (FL) is gaining popularity for tasks parameters. Additionally, FL accelerates method of multipliers (ADMM) [18] within a single client set the learning process by allowing parallel computations across has been proposed [19], [20].

In high-stakes decision-making tasks within legal NLP, such as Case Outcome Classification (COC), quantifying a model's predictive confidence is crucial. Confidence estimation enables humans to make more informed decisions, particularly when the model's certainty is low, or where the consequences of a mistake are significant. However, most existing COC works prioritize high task performance over model reliability. This paper conducts an empirical investigation into how various design choices including pre-training corpus, confidence estimator and fine-tuning loss affect the reliability of COC models within the framework of selective prediction. Our experiments on the multi-label COC task, focusing on European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) cases, highlight the importance of a diverse yet domain-specific pre-training corpus for better calibration. Additionally, we demonstrate that larger models tend to exhibit overconfidence, Monte Carlo dropout methods produce reliable confidence estimates, and confident error regularization effectively mitigates overconfidence. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic exploration of selective prediction in legal NLP. Our findings underscore the need for further research on enhancing confidence measurement and improving the trustworthiness of models in the legal domain.

Domain dependence and annotation subjectivity pose challenges for supervised keyword extraction. Based on the premises that second-order keyness patterns are existent at the community level and learnable from annotated keyword extraction datasets, this paper proposes a supervised ranking approach to keyword extraction that ranks keywords with keyness patterns consisting of independent features (such as sublanguage domain and term length) and three categories of dependent features -- heuristic features, specificity features, and representavity features. The approach uses two convolutional-neural-network based models to learn keyness patterns from keyword datasets and overcomes annotation subjectivity by training the two models with bootstrap sampling strategy. Experiments demonstrate that the approach not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on ten keyword datasets in general supervised keyword extraction with an average top-10-F-measure of 0.316 , but also robust cross-domain performance with an average top-10-F-measure of 0.346 on four datasets that are excluded in the training process. Such cross-domain robustness is attributed to the fact that community-level keyness patterns are limited in number and temperately independent of language domains, the distinction between independent features and dependent features, and the sampling training strategy that balances excess risk and lack of negative training data.