This work focuses on advancing security research in the hardware design space by formally defining the realistic problem of Hardware Trojan (HT) detection. The goal is to model HT detection more closely to the real world, i.e., describing the problem as "The Seeker's Dilemma" (an extension of Hide&Seek on a graph), where a detecting agent is unaware of whether circuits are infected by HTs or not. Using this theoretical problem formulation, we create a benchmark that consists of a mixture of HT-free and HT-infected restructured circuits while preserving their original functionalities. The restructured circuits are randomly infected by HTs, causing a situation where the defender is uncertain if a circuit is infected or not. We believe that our innovative dataset will help the community better judge the detection quality of different methods by comparing their success rates in circuit classification. We use our developed benchmark to evaluate three state-of-the-art HT detection tools to show baseline results for this approach. We use Principal Component Analysis to assess the strength of our benchmark, where we observe that some restructured HT-infected circuits are mapped closely to HT-free circuits, leading to significant label misclassification by detectors.

Negative sampling has swiftly risen to prominence as a focal point of research, with wide-ranging applications spanning machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, data mining, and recommender systems. This growing interest raises several critical questions: Does negative sampling really matter? Is there a general framework that can incorporate all existing negative sampling methods? In what fields is it applied? Addressing these questions, we propose a general framework that leverages negative sampling. Delving into the history of negative sampling, we trace the development of negative sampling through five evolutionary paths. We dissect and categorize the strategies used to select negative sample candidates, detailing global, local, mini-batch, hop, and memory-based approaches. Our review categorizes current negative sampling methods into five types: static, hard, GAN-based, Auxiliary-based, and In-batch methods, providing a clear structure for understanding negative sampling. Beyond detailed categorization, we highlight the application of negative sampling in various areas, offering insights into its practical benefits. Finally, we briefly discuss open problems and future directions for negative sampling.

Nowadays, technology is rapidly advancing: bots are writing comments, articles, and reviews. Due to this fact, it is crucial to know if the text was written by a human or by a bot. This paper focuses on comparing structures of the coarse-grained partitions of semantic paths for human-written and bot-generated texts. We compare the clusterizations of datasets of n-grams from literary texts and texts generated by several bots. The hypothesis is that the structures and clusterizations are different. Our research supports the hypothesis. As the semantic structure may be different for different languages, we investigate Russian, English, German, and Vietnamese languages.

Personalized education, tailored to individual student needs, leverages educational technology and artificial intelligence (AI) in the digital age to enhance learning effectiveness. The integration of AI in educational platforms provides insights into academic performance, learning preferences, and behaviors, optimizing the personal learning process. Driven by data mining techniques, it not only benefits students but also provides educators and institutions with tools to craft customized learning experiences. To offer a comprehensive review of recent advancements in personalized educational data mining, this paper focuses on four primary scenarios: educational recommendation, cognitive diagnosis, knowledge tracing, and learning analysis. This paper presents a structured taxonomy for each area, compiles commonly used datasets, and identifies future research directions, emphasizing the role of data mining in enhancing personalized education and paving the way for future exploration and innovation.

We show that the \emph{stochastic gradient} bandit algorithm converges to a \emph{globally optimal} policy at an $O(1/t)$ rate, even with a \emph{constant} step size. Remarkably, global convergence of the stochastic gradient bandit algorithm has not been previously established, even though it is an old algorithm known to be applicable to bandits. The new result is achieved by establishing two novel technical findings: first, the noise of the stochastic updates in the gradient bandit algorithm satisfies a strong ``growth condition'' property, where the variance diminishes whenever progress becomes small, implying that additional noise control via diminishing step sizes is unnecessary; second, a form of ``weak exploration'' is automatically achieved through the stochastic gradient updates, since they prevent the action probabilities from decaying faster than $O(1/t)$, thus ensuring that every action is sampled infinitely often with probability $1$. These two findings can be used to show that the stochastic gradient update is already ``sufficient'' for bandits in the sense that exploration versus exploitation is automatically balanced in a manner that ensures almost sure convergence to a global optimum. These novel theoretical findings are further verified by experimental results.

Machine-learning models demand for periodic updates to improve their average accuracy, exploiting novel architectures and additional data. However, a newly-updated model may commit mistakes that the previous model did not make. Such misclassifications are referred to as negative flips, and experienced by users as a regression of performance. In this work, we show that this problem also affects robustness to adversarial examples, thereby hindering the development of secure model update practices. In particular, when updating a model to improve its adversarial robustness, some previously-ineffective adversarial examples may become misclassified, causing a regression in the perceived security of the system. We propose a novel technique, named robustness-congruent adversarial training, to address this issue. It amounts to fine-tuning a model with adversarial training, while constraining it to retain higher robustness on the adversarial examples that were correctly classified before the update. We show that our algorithm and, more generally, learning with non-regression constraints, provides a theoretically-grounded framework to train consistent estimators. Our experiments on robust models for computer vision confirm that (i) both accuracy and robustness, even if improved after model update, can be affected by negative flips, and (ii) our robustness-congruent adversarial training can mitigate the problem, outperforming competing baseline methods.

In the realm of consumer lending, accurate credit default prediction stands as a critical element in risk mitigation and lending decision optimization. Extensive research has sought continuous improvement in existing models to enhance customer experiences and ensure the sound economic functioning of lending institutions. This study responds to the evolving landscape of credit default prediction, challenging conventional models and introducing innovative approaches. By building upon foundational research and recent innovations, our work aims to redefine the standards of accuracy in credit default prediction, setting a new benchmark for the industry. To overcome these challenges, we present an Ensemble Methods framework comprising LightGBM, XGBoost, and LocalEnsemble modules, each making unique contributions to amplify diversity and improve generalization. By utilizing distinct feature sets, our methodology directly tackles limitations identified in previous studies, with the overarching goal of establishing a novel standard for credit default prediction accuracy. Our experimental findings validate the effectiveness of the ensemble model on the dataset, signifying substantial contributions to the field. This innovative approach not only addresses existing obstacles but also sets a precedent for advancing the accuracy and robustness of credit default prediction models.

A central question of network science is how functional properties of systems arise from their structure. For networked dynamical systems, structure is typically quantified with network measures. A functional property that is of theoretical and practical interest for oscillatory systems is the stability of synchrony to localized perturbations. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been shown to predict this stability successfully; at the same time, network measures have struggled to paint a clear picture. Here we collect 46 relevant network measures and find that no small subset can reliably predict stability. The performance of GNNs can only be matched by combining all network measures and nodewise machine learning. However, unlike GNNs, this approach fails to extrapolate from network ensembles to several real power grid topologies. This suggests that correlations of network measures and function may be misleading, and that GNNs capture the causal relationship between structure and stability substantially better.

Summarization for scientific text has shown significant benefits both for the research community and human society. Given the fact that the nature of scientific text is distinctive and the input of the multi-document summarization task is substantially long, the task requires sufficient embedding generation and text truncation without losing important information. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we propose SKT5SciSumm - a hybrid framework for multi-document scientific summarization (MDSS). We leverage the Sentence-Transformer version of Scientific Paper Embeddings using Citation-Informed Transformers (SPECTER) to encode and represent textual sentences, allowing for efficient extractive summarization using k-means clustering. We employ the T5 family of models to generate abstractive summaries using extracted sentences. SKT5SciSumm achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Multi-XScience dataset. Through extensive experiments and evaluation, we showcase the benefits of our model by using less complicated models to achieve remarkable results, thereby highlighting its potential in advancing the field of multi-document summarization for scientific text.

Retinal images and vasculature reflect the body's micro-and macrovascular health. They can be used to diagnose DM complications, including diabetic retinopathy (DR), neuropathy, nephropathy, and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, as well as forecast the risk of cardiovascular events. Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled systems developed for high-throughput detection of DR using digitized retinal images have become clinically adopted. Beyond DR screening, AI integration also holds immense potential to address challenges associated with the holistic care of the patient with DM. In this work, we aim to comprehensively review the literature for studies on AI applications based on retinal images related to DM diagnosis, prognostication, and management. We will describe the findings of holistic AI-assisted diabetes care, including but not limited to DR screening, and discuss barriers to implementing such systems, including issues concerning ethics, data privacy, equitable access, and explainability. With the ability to evaluate the patient's health status vis a vis DM complication as well as risk prognostication of future cardiovascular complications, AIassisted retinal image analysis has the potential to become a central tool for modern personalized medicine in patients with DM.