AI-based code generators are an emerging solution for automatically writing programs starting from descriptions in natural language, by using deep neural networks (Neural Machine Translation, NMT). In particular, code generators have been used for ethical hacking and offensive security testing by generating proof-of-concept attacks. Unfortunately, the evaluation of code generators still faces several issues. The current practice uses automatic metrics, which compute the textual similarity of generated code with ground-truth references. However, it is not clear what metric to use, and which metric is most suitable for specific contexts. This practical experience report analyzes a large set of output similarity metrics on offensive code generators. We apply the metrics on two state-of-the-art NMT models using two datasets containing offensive assembly and Python code with their descriptions in the English language. We compare the estimates from the automatic metrics with human evaluation and provide practical insights into their strengths and limitations.

积极的安全方法，例如对手仿真，利用有关威胁行为者及其技术的信息（网络威胁智能，CTI）。但是，大多数CTI仍然以非结构化的形式（即自然语言），例如事件报告和泄漏的文件。为了支持主动的安全工作，我们介绍了一项有关使用机器学习（ML）自动将非结构化CTI自动分类为攻击技术的实验研究。我们为CTI分析的两个新数据集做出了贡献，并评估了几种ML模型，包括传统和深度学习模型。我们介绍了几个课程，了解了ML在此任务中的执行方式，哪些分类器在哪些条件下（这是分类错误的主要原因）以及CTI分析的未来挑战。

This paper proposes a question-answering system that can answer questions whose supporting evidence is spread over multiple (potentially long) documents. The system, called Visconde, uses a three-step pipeline to perform the task: decompose, retrieve, and aggregate. The first step decomposes the question into simpler questions using a few-shot large language model (LLM). Then, a state-of-the-art search engine is used to retrieve candidate passages from a large collection for each decomposed question. In the final step, we use the LLM in a few-shot setting to aggregate the contents of the passages into the final answer. The system is evaluated on three datasets: IIRC, Qasper, and StrategyQA. Results suggest that current retrievers are the main bottleneck and that readers are already performing at the human level as long as relevant passages are provided. The system is also shown to be more effective when the model is induced to give explanations before answering a question. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/neuralmind-ai/visconde}.

A systematic review on machine-learning strategies for improving generalizability (cross-subjects and cross-sessions) electroencephalography (EEG) based in emotion classification was realized. In this context, the non-stationarity of EEG signals is a critical issue and can lead to the Dataset Shift problem. Several architectures and methods have been proposed to address this issue, mainly based on transfer learning methods. 418 papers were retrieved from the Scopus, IEEE Xplore and PubMed databases through a search query focusing on modern machine learning techniques for generalization in EEG-based emotion assessment. Among these papers, 75 were found eligible based on their relevance to the problem. Studies lacking a specific cross-subject and cross-session validation strategy and making use of other biosignals as support were excluded. On the basis of the selected papers' analysis, a taxonomy of the studies employing Machine Learning (ML) methods was proposed, together with a brief discussion on the different ML approaches involved. The studies with the best results in terms of average classification accuracy were identified, supporting that transfer learning methods seem to perform better than other approaches. A discussion is proposed on the impact of (i) the emotion theoretical models and (ii) psychological screening of the experimental sample on the classifier performances.

Plastic shopping bags that get carried away from the side of roads and tangled on cotton plants can end up at cotton gins if not removed before the harvest. Such bags may not only cause problem in the ginning process but might also get embodied in cotton fibers reducing its quality and marketable value. Therefore, it is required to detect, locate, and remove the bags before cotton is harvested. Manually detecting and locating these bags in cotton fields is labor intensive, time-consuming and a costly process. To solve these challenges, we present application of four variants of YOLOv5 (YOLOv5s, YOLOv5m, YOLOv5l and YOLOv5x) for detecting plastic shopping bags using Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)-acquired RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) images. We also show fixed effect model tests of color of plastic bags as well as YOLOv5-variant on average precision (AP), mean average precision (mAP@50) and accuracy. In addition, we also demonstrate the effect of height of plastic bags on the detection accuracy. It was found that color of bags had significant effect (p < 0.001) on accuracy across all the four variants while it did not show any significant effect on the AP with YOLOv5m (p = 0.10) and YOLOv5x (p = 0.35) at 95% confidence level. Similarly, YOLOv5-variant did not show any significant effect on the AP (p = 0.11) and accuracy (p = 0.73) of white bags, but it had significant effects on the AP (p = 0.03) and accuracy (p = 0.02) of brown bags including on the mAP@50 (p = 0.01) and inference speed (p < 0.0001). Additionally, height of plastic bags had significant effect (p < 0.0001) on overall detection accuracy. The findings reported in this paper can be useful in speeding up removal of plastic bags from cotton fields before harvest and thereby reducing the amount of contaminants that end up at cotton gins.

Bi-encoders and cross-encoders are widely used in many state-of-the-art retrieval pipelines. In this work we study the generalization ability of these two types of architectures on a wide range of parameter count on both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. We find that the number of parameters and early query-document interactions of cross-encoders play a significant role in the generalization ability of retrieval models. Our experiments show that increasing model size results in marginal gains on in-domain test sets, but much larger gains in new domains never seen during fine-tuning. Furthermore, we show that cross-encoders largely outperform bi-encoders of similar size in several tasks. In the BEIR benchmark, our largest cross-encoder surpasses a state-of-the-art bi-encoder by more than 4 average points. Finally, we show that using bi-encoders as first-stage retrievers provides no gains in comparison to a simpler retriever such as BM25 on out-of-domain tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/guilhermemr04/scaling-zero-shot-retrieval.git

The understanding capabilities of current state-of-the-art 3D models are limited by datasets with a small number of annotated data and a pre-defined set of categories. In its 2D counterpart, recent advances have shown that similar problems can be significantly alleviated by employing knowledge from other modalities, such as language. Inspired by this, leveraging multimodal information for 3D modality could be promising to improve 3D understanding under the restricted data regime, but this line of research is not well studied. Therefore, we introduce ULIP to learn a unified representation of image, text, and 3D point cloud by pre-training with object triplets from the three modalities. To overcome the shortage of training triplets, ULIP leverages a pre-trained vision-language model that has already learned a common visual and textual space by training with massive image-text pairs. Then, ULIP learns a 3D representation space aligned with the common image-text space, using a small number of automatically synthesized triplets. ULIP is agnostic to 3D backbone networks and can easily be integrated into any 3D architecture. Experiments show that ULIP effectively improves the performance of multiple recent 3D backbones by simply pre-training them on ShapeNet55 using our framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both standard 3D classification and zero-shot 3D classification on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN. ULIP also improves the performance of PointMLP by around 3% in 3D classification on ScanObjectNN, and outperforms PointCLIP by 28.8% on top-1 accuracy for zero-shot 3D classification on ModelNet40. Our code and pre-trained models will be released.

As Artificial and Robotic Systems are increasingly deployed and relied upon for real-world applications, it is important that they exhibit the ability to continually learn and adapt in dynamically-changing environments, becoming Lifelong Learning Machines. Continual/lifelong learning (LL) involves minimizing catastrophic forgetting of old tasks while maximizing a model's capability to learn new tasks. This paper addresses the challenging lifelong reinforcement learning (L2RL) setting. Pushing the state-of-the-art forward in L2RL and making L2RL useful for practical applications requires more than developing individual L2RL algorithms; it requires making progress at the systems-level, especially research into the non-trivial problem of how to integrate multiple L2RL algorithms into a common framework. In this paper, we introduce the Lifelong Reinforcement Learning Components Framework (L2RLCF), which standardizes L2RL systems and assimilates different continual learning components (each addressing different aspects of the lifelong learning problem) into a unified system. As an instantiation of L2RLCF, we develop a standard API allowing easy integration of novel lifelong learning components. We describe a case study that demonstrates how multiple independently-developed LL components can be integrated into a single realized system. We also introduce an evaluation environment in order to measure the effect of combining various system components. Our evaluation environment employs different LL scenarios (sequences of tasks) consisting of Starcraft-2 minigames and allows for the fair, comprehensive, and quantitative comparison of different combinations of components within a challenging common evaluation environment.

One of the common traits of past and present approaches for Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) is that they rely upon discrete labels drawn from a predefined linguistic inventory to classify predicate senses and their arguments. However, we argue this need not be the case. In this paper, we present an approach that leverages Definition Modeling to introduce a generalized formulation of SRL as the task of describing predicate-argument structures using natural language definitions instead of discrete labels. Our novel formulation takes a first step towards placing interpretability and flexibility foremost, and yet our experiments and analyses on PropBank-style and FrameNet-style, dependency-based and span-based SRL also demonstrate that a flexible model with an interpretable output does not necessarily come at the expense of performance. We release our software for research purposes at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/dsrl.

In this paper, we introduce MINTIME, a video deepfake detection approach that captures spatial and temporal anomalies and handles instances of multiple people in the same video and variations in face sizes. Previous approaches disregard such information either by using simple a-posteriori aggregation schemes, i.e., average or max operation, or using only one identity for the inference, i.e., the largest one. On the contrary, the proposed approach builds on a Spatio-Temporal TimeSformer combined with a Convolutional Neural Network backbone to capture spatio-temporal anomalies from the face sequences of multiple identities depicted in a video. This is achieved through an Identity-aware Attention mechanism that attends to each face sequence independently based on a masking operation and facilitates video-level aggregation. In addition, two novel embeddings are employed: (i) the Temporal Coherent Positional Embedding that encodes each face sequence's temporal information and (ii) the Size Embedding that encodes the size of the faces as a ratio to the video frame size. These extensions allow our system to adapt particularly well in the wild by learning how to aggregate information of multiple identities, which is usually disregarded by other methods in the literature. It achieves state-of-the-art results on the ForgeryNet dataset with an improvement of up to 14% AUC in videos containing multiple people and demonstrates ample generalization capabilities in cross-forgery and cross-dataset settings. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/davide-coccomini/MINTIME-Multi-Identity-size-iNvariant-TIMEsformer-for-Video-Deepfake-Detection.