ICAART 2024 Abstracts

Area 1 - Artificial Intelligence
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 2 - Agents
Full Papers Short Papers

Area 1 - Artificial Intelligence

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 12
Title:

Deep Reinforcement Learning and Transfer Learning Methods Used in Autonomous Financial Trading Agents
Authors:

Ciprian Paduraru, Catalina C. Patilea and Stefan Iordache
Abstract: It is reported that some of the largest companies from the banking and business sectors are investing massively in the field of trading with automated methods. The methods used vary from classical time series based methods to Deep Learning and more recently Reinforcement Learning (RL). The main goal of this work is first to improve the state of the art in RL-based trading agents. Then, we focus on evaluating the robustness of the trained agents when they are transferred to different trading markets than the ones they were trained on. The framework we developed, RL4FIN, is open source and can be tested by both academia and industry. The evaluation section shows the improvements over state-of-the-art using some public datasets.
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Paper Nr: 17
Title:

Adaptive Action Supervision in Reinforcement Learning from Real-World Multi-Agent Demonstrations
Authors:

Keisuke Fujii, Kazushi Tsutsui, Atom Scott, Hiroshi Nakahara, Naoya Takeishi and Yoshinobu Kawahara
Abstract: Modeling of real-world biological multi-agents is a fundamental problem in various scientific and engineering fields. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework to generate flexible and diverse behaviors in cyberspace; however, when modeling real-world biological multi-agents, there is a domain gap between behaviors in the source (i.e., real-world data) and the target (i.e., cyberspace for RL), and the source environment parameters are usually unknown. In this paper, we propose a method for adaptive action supervision in RL from real-world demonstrations in multi-agent scenarios. We adopt an approach that combines RL and supervised learning by selecting actions of demonstrations in RL based on the minimum distance of dynamic time warping for utilizing the information of the unknown source dynamics. This approach can be easily applied to many existing neural network architectures and provide us with an RL model balanced between reproducibility as imitation and generalization ability to obtain rewards in cyberspace. In the experiments, using chase-and-escape and football tasks with the different dynamics between the unknown source and target environments, we show that our approach achieved a balance between the reproducibility and the generalization ability compared with the baselines. In particular, we used the tracking data of professional football players as expert demonstrations in football and show successful performances despite the larger gap between behaviors in the source and target environments than the chase-and-escape task.
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Paper Nr: 25
Title:

Hybrid Quanvolutional Echo State Network for Time Series Prediction
Authors:

Rebh Soltani, Emna Benmohamed and Hela Ltifi
Abstract: Quantum Machine Learning (QML) combines quantum physics with machine learning techniques to enhance algorithm performance. By leveraging the unique properties of quantum computing, such as superposition and entanglement, QML aims to solve complex problems beyond the capabilities of classical computing. In this study, we developed a hybrid model, the quantum convolutional Echo State Network, which incorporates QML principles into the Reservoir Computing framework. Evaluating its performance on benchmark time-series datasets, we observed improved results in terms of mean square error (MSE) and reduced time complexity compared to the classical Echo State Network (ESN). These findings highlight the potential of QML to advance time-series prediction and underscore the benefits of merging quantum and machine learning approaches.
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Paper Nr: 31
Title:

VP-DARTS: Validated Pruning Differentiable Architecture Search
Authors:

Tai-Che Feng and Sheng-De Wang
Abstract: Recently Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) has gained increasing attention due to its simplicity and efficient search capability. However, such search methods have a significant chance of encountering overfitting, which can result in the performance collapse problem of the discovered models. In this paper, we proposed VP-DARTS, a validated pruning-based differentiable architecture search method using soft pruning, to address this issue. Firstly, unlike previous search methods, we consider the differentiable architecture search process as a model pruning problem. It prunes or removes unimportant operations from the supernet that contains all possible architectures to obtain the final model. We also show that the traditional hard pruning method would gradually reduce the capacity of the search space during training, leading to local optimal results. To get better architectures than hard pruning, we proposed using a parameterized soft pruning approach in our training process. Secondly, the original DARTS method selects the operation with the maximum architecture parameter on each edge to form the final architecture after training. But we found that this approach cannot truly reflect their importance. Therefore, we estimate the impact on the supernet of each candidate operation by using a subset of the validation set to evaluate its degree of importance. Finally, we implement our method on the NAS-Bench-201 search space, and the experimental results show that VP-DARTS is a robust search method that can obtain architectures with good performance and stable results.
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Paper Nr: 35
Title:

Lazy Nested Monte Carlo Search for Coalition Structure Generation
Authors:

Milo Roucairol, Jérôme Arjonilla, Abdallah Saffidine and Tristan Cazenave
Abstract: This paper explores Monte-Carlo Search algorithms applied to Multiagent Systems (MAS), specifically focusing on the problem of Coalition Structure Generation (CSG). CSG is a NP-Hard problem consisting in partitioning agents into coalitions to optimize collective performance. Our study makes three contributions: (i) a novel action space representation tailored for CSG, (ii) a comprehensive comparative analysis of multiple algorithms, and the introduction of Lazy NMCS, (iii) a cutting-edge method that surpasses previous benchmarks. By outlining efficient coalition formation strategies, our findings offer insights for advancing MAS research and practical applications.
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Paper Nr: 39
Title:

Identification of Opinion and Ground in Customer Review Using Heterogeneous Datasets
Authors:

Po-Min Chuang, Kiyoaki Shirai and Natthawut Kertkeidkachorn
Abstract: Online reviews are a valuable source of information for both potential buyers and enterprises, but not all reviews provide us helpful information. This paper aims at the identification of a user’s opinion and its reason or ground in a review, supposing that a review including a ground for an opinion is helpful. A classifier to identify an opinion and a ground, called the opinion-ground classifier, is trained from three heterogeneous datasets. The first is the existing dataset for discourse analysis, KWDLC, which is the manually labeled but out-domain dataset. The second is the in-domain but weakly supervised dataset made by a rule-based method that checks the existence of causality discourse markers. The third is another in-domain dataset augmented by ChatGPT, where a prompt to generate new samples is given to ChatGPT. We train several models as the opinion-ground classifier. Results of our experiments show that the use of automatically constructed datasets significantly improves the classification performance. The F1-score of our best model is 0 .71, which is 0.12 points higher than the model trained from the existing dataset only.
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Paper Nr: 41
Title:

A Challenging Data Set for Evaluating Part-of-Speech Taggers
Authors:

Mattias Wahde, Minerva Suvanto and Marco D. Vedova
Abstract: We introduce a novel, challenging test set for part-of-speech (POS) tagging, consisting of sentences in which only one word is POS-tagged. First derived from Wiktionary, and then manually curated, it is intended as an out-of-sample test set for POS taggers trained over larger data sets. Sentences were selected such that at least one of four standard benchmark taggers would incorrectly tag the word under consideration for a given sentence, thus identifying challenging instances of POS tagging. Somewhat surprisingly, we find that the benchmark taggers often fail on rather straightforward instances of POS tagging, and we analyze these failures in some detail. We also compute the performance of a state-of-the-art DNN-based POS tagger over our set, obtaining an accuracy of around 0.87 for this out-of-sample test, far below its reported performance in the literature. Also for this tagger, we find instances of failure even in rather simple cases.
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Paper Nr: 49
Title:

Dataset Characteristics and Their Impact on Offline Policy Learning of Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits
Authors:

Piotr Januszewski, Dominik Grzegorzek and Paweł Czarnul
Abstract: The Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits (CMAB) framework is pivotal for learning to make decisions. However, due to challenges in deploying online algorithms, there is a shift towards offline policy learning, which relies on pre-existing datasets. This study examines the relationship between the quality of these datasets and the performance of offline policy learning algorithms, specifically, Neural Greedy and NeuraLCB. Our results demonstrate that NeuraLCB can learn from various datasets, while Neural Greedy necessitates extensive coverage of the action-space for effective learning. Moreover, the way data is collected significantly affects offline methods’ efficiency. This underscores the critical role of dataset quality in offline policy learning.
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Paper Nr: 54
Title:

Improving Parameter Training for VQEs by Sequential Hamiltonian Assembly
Authors:

Jonas Stein, Navid Roshani, Maximilian Zorn, Philipp Altmann, Michael Kölle and Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Abstract: A central challenge in quantum machine learning is the design and training of parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs). Similar to deep learning, vanishing gradients pose immense problems in the trainability of PQCs, which have been shown to arise from a multitude of sources. One such cause are non-local loss functions, that demand the measurement of a large subset of involved qubits. To facilitate the parameter training for quantum applications using global loss functions, we propose a Sequential Hamiltonian Assembly (SHA) approach, which iteratively approximates the loss function using local components. Aiming for a prove of principle, we evaluate our approach using Graph Coloring problem with a Varational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE). Simulation results show, that our approach outperforms conventional parameter training by 29.99% and the empirical state of the art, Layerwise Learning, by 5.12% in the mean accuracy. This paves the way towards locality-aware learning techniques, allowing to evade vanishing gradients for a large class of practically relevant problems.
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Paper Nr: 59
Title:

CNNs Sparsification and Expansion for Continual Learning
Authors:

Basile Tousside, Jörg Frochte and Tobias Meisen
Abstract: Learning multiple sequentially arriving tasks without forgetting previous knowledge, known as Continual Learning (CL), remains a long-standing challenge for neural networks. Most existing CL methods rely on data replay. However, they are not applicable when past data is unavailable or is not allowed to be synthetically generated. To address this challenge, we propose Sparification and Expansion-based Continual Learning (SECL). SECL avoids forgetting of previous tasks by ensuring the stability of the CNN via a stability regularization term, which prevents filters detected as important for past tasks to deviate too much when learning a new task. On top of that, SECL makes the network plastic via a plasticity regularization term that leverage the over-parameterization of CNNs to efficiently sparsify the network and tunes unimportant filters making them relevant for future tasks. Also, SECL enhances the plasticity of the network through a simple but effective heuristic mechanism that automatically decides when and where (at which layers) to expand the network. Experiments on popular CL vision benchmarks show that SECL leads to significant improvements over state-of-the-art method in terms of overall CL performance, as measured by classification accuracy as well as in terms of avoiding catastrophic forgetting.
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Paper Nr: 66
Title:

Metrics for Popularity Bias in Dynamic Recommender Systems
Authors:

Valentijn Braun, Debarati Bhaumik and Diptish Dey
Abstract: Albeit the widespread application of recommender systems (RecSys) in our daily lives, rather limited research has been done on quantifying unfairness and biases present in such systems. Prior work largely focuses on determining whether a RecSys is discriminating or not but does not compute the amount of bias present in these systems. Biased recommendations may lead to decisions that can potentially have adverse effects on individuals, sensitive user groups, and society. Hence, it is important to quantify these biases for fair and safe commercial applications of these systems. This paper focuses on quantifying popularity bias that stems directly from the output of RecSys models, leading to over recommendation of popular items that are likely to be misaligned with user preferences. Four metrics to quantify popularity bias in RescSys over time in dynamic setting across different sensitive user groups have been proposed. These metrics have been demonstrated for four collaborative filtering based RecSys algorithms trained on two commonly used benchmark datasets in the literature. Results obtained show that the metrics proposed provide a comprehensive understanding of growing disparities in treatment between sensitive groups over time when used conjointly.
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Paper Nr: 68
Title:

Investigation into the Training Dynamics of Learned Optimizers
Authors:

Jan Sobotka, Petr Šimánek and Daniel Vašata
Abstract: Optimization is an integral part of modern deep learning. Recently, the concept of learned optimizers has emerged as a way to accelerate this optimization process by replacing traditional, hand-crafted algorithms with meta-learned functions. Despite the initial promising results of these methods, issues with stability and generalization still remain, limiting their practical use. Moreover, their inner workings and behavior under different conditions are not yet fully understood, making it difficult to come up with improvements. For this reason, our work examines their optimization trajectories from the perspective of network architecture symmetries and parameter update distributions. Furthermore, by contrasting the learned optimizers with their manually designed counterparts, we identify several key insights that demonstrate how each approach can benefit from the strengths of the other.
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Paper Nr: 77
Title:

HierNet: Image Recognition with Hierarchical Convolutional Networks
Authors:

Levente Tempfli and Csanád Sándor
Abstract: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have proven to be an effective method for image recognition due to their ability to extract features and learn the internal representation of the input data. However, traditional CNNs disregard the hierarchy of the input data, which can lead to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel method of organizing a CNN into a quasi-decision tree, where the edges represent the feature-extracting layers of a CNN and the nodes represent the classifiers. The structure of the decision tree corresponds to the hierarchical relationships between the label classes, meaning that the visually similar classes are located in the same subtree. We also introduce a simple semi-supervised method to determine these hierarchical relations to avoid having to manually construct such a hierarchy between a large number of classes. We evaluate our method on the CIFAR-100 dataset using ResNet as our base CNN model. Our results show that the proposed method outperforms this base CNN between 2.12-3.77% (depending on the version of the architecture), demonstrating the effectiveness of incorporating input hierarchy into CNNs. Code is available at https://github.com/levtempfli/HierNet.
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Paper Nr: 78
Title:

Garment Returns Prediction for AI-Based Processing and Waste Reduction in E-Commerce
Authors:

Marie Niederlaender, Aena N. Lodi, Soeren Gry, Rajarshi Biswas and Dirk Werth
Abstract: Product returns are an increasing burden for manufacturers and online retailers across the globe, both economically and ecologically. Especially in the textile and fashion industry, on average more than half of the ordered products are being returned. The first step towards reducing returns and being able to process unavoidable returns effectively, is the reliable prediction of upcoming returns at the time of order, allowing to estimate inventory risk and to plan the next steps to be taken to resell and avoid destruction of the garments. This study explores the potential of 5 different Machine Learning Algorithms combined with regualised target encoding for categorical features to predict returns of a German online retailer, exclusively selling festive dresses and garments for special occasions, where a balanced accuracy of up to 0.86 can be reached even for newly introduced products, if historical data on customer behavior is available. This work aims to be extended towards an AI-based recommendation system to find the ecologically and economically best processing strategy for garment returns to reduce waste and the financial burden on retailers.
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Paper Nr: 79
Title:

GNNDLD: Graph Neural Network with Directional Label Distribution
Authors:

Chandramani Chaudhary, Nirmal K. Boran, N. Sangeeth and Virendra Singh
Abstract: By leveraging graph structure, Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have emerged as a useful model for graph-based datasets. While it is widely assumed that GNNs outperform basic neural networks, recent research shows that for some datasets, neural networks outperform GNNs. Heterophily is one of the primary causes of GNN performance degradation, and many models have been proposed to handle it. Furthermore, some intrinsic information in graph structure is often overlooked, such as edge direction. In this work, we propose GNNDLD, a model which exploits the edge direction and label distribution around a node in varying neighborhoods (hop-wise). We combine features from all layers to retain both low-pass frequency and high-pass frequency components of a node because different layers of neural networks provide different types of information. In addition, to avoid oversmoothing, we decouple the node feature aggregation and transformation operations. By combining all of these concepts, we present a simple yet very efficient model. Experiments on six standard real-world datasets show the superiority of GNNDLD over the state-of-the-art models in both homophily and heterophily.
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Paper Nr: 83
Title:

Exploring Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Quantum Boltzmann Machines in Fraud Detection
Authors:

Jonas Stein, Daniëlle Schuman, Magdalena Benkard, Thomas Holger, Wanja Sajko, Michael Kölle, Jonas Nüßlein, Leo Sünkel, Olivier Salomon and Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Abstract: Anomaly detection in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is a critical task in cybersecurity programs of large companies. With rapidly growing amounts of data and the omnipresence of zero-day attacks, manual and rule-based detection techniques are no longer eligible in practice. While classical machine learning approaches to this problem exist, they frequently show unsatisfactory performance in differentiating malicious from benign anomalies. A promising approach to attain superior generalization compard to currently employed machine learning techniques is using quantum generative models. Allowing for the largest representation of data on available quantum hardware, we investigate Quantum-Annealing-based Quantum Boltzmann Machines (QBMs) for the given problem. We contribute the first fully unsupervised approach for the problem of anomaly detection using QBMs and evaluate its performance on an EDR-inspired synthetic dataset. Our results indicate that QBMs can outperform their classical analog (i.e., Restricted Boltzmann Machines) in terms of result quality and training steps in special cases. When employing Quantum Annealers from D-Wave Systems, we conclude that either more accurate classical simulators or substantially more QPU time is needed to conduct the necessary hyperparameter optimization allowing to replicate our simulation results on quantum hardware.
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Paper Nr: 104
Title:

Multi-Granular Evaluation of Diverse Counterfactual Explanations
Authors:

Yining Yuan, Kevin McAreavey, Shujun Li and Weiru Liu
Abstract: As a popular approach in Explainable AI (XAI), an increasing number of counterfactual explanation algorithms have been proposed in the context of making machine learning classifiers more trustworthy and transparent. This paper reports our evaluations of algorithms that can output diverse counterfactuals for one instance. We first evaluate the performance of DiCE-Random, DiCE-KDTree, DiCE-Genetic and Alibi-CFRL, taking XGBoost as the machine learning model for binary classification problems. Then, we compare their suggested feature changes with feature importance by SHAP. Moreover, our study highlights that synthetic counterfactuals, drawn from the input domain but not necessarily the training data, outperform native counter-factuals from the training data regarding data privacy and validity. This research aims to guide practitioners in choosing the most suitable algorithm for generating diverse counterfactual explanations.
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Paper Nr: 109
Title:

Multiple Agents Dispatch via Batch Synchronous Actor Critic in Autonomous Mobility on Demand Systems
Authors:

Jiyao Li and Vicki H. Allan
Abstract: Autonomous Mobility on Demand (AMoD) systems are a promising area in the emerging field of intelligent transportation systems. In this paper, we focus on the problem of how to dispatch a fleet of autonomous vehicles (AVs) within a city while balancing supply and demand. We first formulate the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) of which the goal is to maximize the accumulated average reward, then propose the Multiagent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) framework. The Temporal-Spatial Dispatching Network (TSD-Net) that combines both policy and value network learns representation features facilitating spatial information with its temporal signals. The Batch Synchronous Actor Critic (BS-AC) samples experiences from the Rollout Buffer with replacement and trains parameters of the TSD-Net. Based on the state value from the TSD-Net, the Priority Destination Sampling Assignment (PDSA) algorithm defines orders’ priority by their destinations. Popular destinations are preferred as it is easier for agents to find future work in a popular location. Finally, with the real-world city scale dataset from Chicago, we compare our approach to several competing baselines. The results show that our method is able to outperform other baseline methods with respect to effectiveness, scalability, and robustness.
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Paper Nr: 115
Title:

Knowledge Modelling, Strategy Designing, and Agent Engineering for Reconnaissance Blind Chess
Authors:

Robin Stöhr, Shuai Wang and Zhisheng Huang
Abstract: Reconnaissance Blind Chess (RBC) is a unique chess variant where players have limited visibility of a 3x3 square in each round. This paper offers a comparative analysis of the performance of extant agents, along with an assessment of their ability to model their opponents’ knowledge. On the basis of our analytical findings, we propose novel and efficient sensing and movement strategies. Subsequently, these strategies are tested through agent-based gameplay. Furthermore, our experimentation extends to the inference of new knowledge through a strategy based on the Theory of Mind. Collectively, these insights contribute to the selection of the most promising strategies for the design of our Scorca agent. By the time of the paper’s submission, it occupies the second position on the global leaderboard for the RBC game. To conclude, we engage in a discussion of the inherent limitations of the extant agents and offer a glimpse into potential future strategies.
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Paper Nr: 120
Title:

Fingerprint Large Classification Using Sequential Learning on Parallel Environment
Authors:

Nicolás A. Reyes-Reyes, Marcela C. González-Araya and Wladimir E. Soto-Silva
Abstract: Fingerprint classification allows a biometric identification system to reduce search space in databases and therefore response times. In the literature, fingerprint classification has been addressed through different approaches where deep learning techniques such as convolutional neural networks have been gaining attention. However, the proposed approaches use extremely small data sets for large-scale real-world scenarios that could worsen accuracy rates due to interclass and intraclass variations in fingerprints. For this reason, we proposed a fingerprint classification approach that allows us to address this problem by considering millions of samples. For this purpose, a classifier based on neural networks trained using online sequential extreme learning machines was developed. Likewise, to accelerate the training of the classifier, the matrix operations inside it was run in a graphic processing unit. In order to evaluate our proposal, the approach was tested on three datasets with more than two million synthetic fingerprint image descriptors. The results are similar in terms of accuracy and computational time to recent approaches but using more than 2.5 million samples.
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Paper Nr: 122
Title:

DRL4HFC: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Container-Based Scheduling in Hybrid Fog/Cloud System
Authors:

Ameni Kallel, Molka Rekik and Mahdi Khemakhem
Abstract: The IoT-based applications have a set of complex requirements, such as a reliable network connection and handling data from multiple sources quickly and accurately. Therefore, combining a Fog environment with a Cloud environment can be beneficial for IoT-based applications, as it provides a distributed computing system that can handle large amounts of data in real time. However, the microservice provision to execute such applications with achieving a high Quality of Service (QoS) and low bandwidth communications. Thus, the container-based microservice scheduling problem in a hybrid Fog and Cloud environment is a complex issue that has yet to be fully solved. In this work, we first propose a container-based microservice scheduling model for a hybrid architecture. Our model is a multi-objective scheduler, named DRL4HFC, for Hybrid Fog/Cloud architecture. It is based on two Deep Reinforce Learning (DRL) agents. DRL-based agents learn the inherent properties of the various microservices, nodes, and environments to determine the appropriate placement of each microservice instance required to execute each task within the Business Process (BP). Our proposal aims to reduce the execution time, compute and network resource consumption, and resource occupancy rates of Fog/Cloud nodes. Second, we present a set of experiments in order to evaluate the effectiveness of our algorithm in terms of cost, quality, and time. The experimental results demonstrate that DRL4HFC achieves faster execution times, lower communication costs and better balanced resource loads.
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Paper Nr: 127
Title:

An Analysis of Knowledge Representation for Anime Recommendation Using Graph Neural Networks
Authors:

Yuki Saito, Shusaku Egami, Yuichi Sei, Yasuyuki Tahara and Akihiko Ohsuga
Abstract: In recent years, entertainment content, such as movies, music, and anime, has been gaining attention due to the stay-at-home demand caused by the expansion of COVID-19. In the content domain, research in the field of knowledge representation is primarily concerned with accurately describing metadata. Therefore, different knowledge representations are required for applications in downstream tasks. In this study, we aim to clarify effective knowledge representation through a case study of recommending anime works. Thus, we hypothesized how to represent anime works knowledge to improve recommendation performance from both quantitative and qualitative aspects and verified the hypotheses by changing the knowledge representation structure according to the hypothesis. Initially, we collected data about anime works from multiple data sources and integrated them to construct a knowledge graph (KG). We also prepared several KGs by varying the knowledge configuration. Subsequently, we compared the recommendation performance of each KG as an input to the graph neural networks. As a result, it was found that the amount of semantic relationships was proportional to the recommendation performance and that the properties that can characterize the work contributed to the recommendation.
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Paper Nr: 129
Title:

Foundations of Dispatchability for Simple Temporal Networks with Uncertainty
Authors:

Luke Hunsberger and Roberto Posenato
Abstract: Simple Temporal Networks (STNs) are a widely used formalism for representing and reasoning about temporal constraints on activities. The dispatchability of an STN was originally defined as a guarantee that a specific real-time execution algorithm would necessarily satisfy all of the STN’s constraints while preserving maximum flexibility but requiring minimal computation. A Simple Temporal Network with Uncertainty (STNU) augments an STN to accommodate actions with uncertain durations. However, the dispatchability of an STNU was defined differently: in terms of the dispatchability of its so-called STN projections. It was then argued informally that this definition provided a similar real-time execution guarantee, but without specifying the execution algorithm. This paper formally defines a real-time execution algorithm for STNUs that similarly preserves maximum flexibility while requiring minimal computation. It then proves that an STNU is dispatchable if and only if every run of that real-time execution algorithm necessarily satisfies the STNU’s constraints no matter how the uncertain durations play out. By formally connecting STNU dispatchability to an explicit real-time execution algorithm, the paper fills in important elements of the foundations of the dispatchability of STNUs.
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Paper Nr: 139
Title:

Big Data Synthesis and Class Imbalance Rectification for Enhanced Forest Fire Classification Modeling
Authors:

Fatemeh Tavakoli, Kshirasagar Naik, Marzia Zaman, Richard Purcell, Srinivas Sampalli, Abdul Mutakabbir, Chung-Horng Lung and Thambirajah Ravichandran
Abstract: Forest fires have been escalating in frequency and intensity across Canada in recent times. This study employs machine learning techniques and builds a dataset framework utilizing Copernicus climate reanalysis data combined with historical fire data to develop a fire classification framework. Three algorithms, Random Forest, XGBoost, and LightGBM, were evaluated. Given the pronounced class imbalance of 154:1 between “non-fire” and “fire” events, we rigorously employed two re-sampling strategies: Spatiotemporal, focusing on spatial and seasonal considerations, and Technique-Driven, leveraging advanced algorithmic approaches. Ultimately, XGBoost combined with NearMiss Version 3 in a 0.09 sampling ratio between “non-fire” and “fire” events yielded the best results: 98.08% precision, 86.06% sensitivity, and 93.03% specificity.
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Paper Nr: 151
Title:

A Hierarchical Anytime k-NN Classifier for Large-Scale High-Speed Data Streams
Authors:

Aarti, Jagat S. Challa, Hrishikesh Harsh, Utkarsh D., Mansi Agarwal, Raghav Chaudhary, Navneet Goyal and Poonam Goyal
Abstract: The k-Nearest Neighbor Classifier (k-NN) is a widely used classification technique used in data streams. However, traditional k-NN-based stream classification algorithms can’t handle varying inter-arrival rates of objects in the streams. Anytime algorithms are a class of algorithms that effectively handle data streams that have variable stream speed and trade execution time with the quality of results. In this paper, we introduce a novel anytime k-NN classification method for data streams namely, ANY-k-NN. This method employs a proposed hierarchical structure, the Any-NN-forest, as its classification model. The Any-NN-forest maintains a hierarchy of micro-clusters with different levels of granularity in its trees. This enables ANY-k-NN to effectively handle variable stream speeds and incrementally adapt its classification model using incoming labeled data. Moreover, it can efficiently manage large data streams as the model construction is less expensive. It is also capable of handling concept drift and class evolution. Additionally, this paper also presents ANY-MP-k-NN, a first-of-its-kind framework for anytime k-NN classification of multi-port data streams over distributed memory architectures. ANY-MP-k-NN can efficiently manage very large and high-speed data streams and deliver highly accurate classification results. The experimental findings confirm the superior performance of the proposed methods compared to the state-of-the-art in terms of classification accuracy.
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Paper Nr: 162
Title:

Neural Architecture Search for Bearing Fault Classification
Authors:

Edicson B. Diaz, Enrique Naredo, Nicolas M. Díaz, Douglas M. Dias, Maria B. Diaz, Susan Harnett and Conor Ryan
Abstract: In this research, we address bearing fault classification by evaluating three neural network models: 1D Con-volutional Neural Network (1D-CNN), CNN-Visual Geometry Group (CNN-VGG), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). Utilizing vibration data, our approach incorporates data augmentation to address the limited availability of fault class data. A significant aspect of our methodology is the application of neural architecture search (NAS), which automates the evolution of network architectures, including hyperparameter tuning, significantly enhancing model training. Our use of early stopping strategies effectively prevents overfitting, ensuring robust model generalization. The results highlight the potential of integrating advanced machine learning models with NAS in bearing fault classification and suggest possibilities for further improvements, particularly in model differentiation for specific fault classes.
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Paper Nr: 174
Title:

A Probabilistic Approach for Detecting Real Concept Drift
Authors:

Sirvan Parasteh and Samira Sadaoui
Abstract: Concept Drift (CD) is a significant challenge in real-world data stream applications, as its presence requires predictive models to adapt to data-distribution changes over time. Our paper introduces a new algorithm, Probabilistic Real-Drift Detection (PRDD), designed to track and respond to CD based on its probabilistic definitions. PRDD utilizes the classifier’s prediction errors and confidence levels to detect specifically the Real CD. In an exhaustive empirical study involving 16 synthetic datasets with Abrupt and Gradual drifts, PRDD is compared to well-known CD detection methods. PRDD is highly performing and shows a time complexity of O(1) per datapoint, ensuring its computational efficiency in high-velocity environments.
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Paper Nr: 175
Title:

Optimization of Fuzzy Rule Induction Based on Decision Tree and Truth Table: A Case Study of Multi-Class Fault Diagnosis
Authors:

Abdelouadoud Kerarmi, Assia Kamal-Idrissi and Amal F. Seghrouchni
Abstract: Fuzzy Logic (FL) offers valuable advantages in multi-classification tasks, offering the capability to deal with imprecise and uncertain data for nuanced decision-making. However, generating precise fuzzy sets requires substantial effort and expertise. Also, the higher the number of rules in the FL system, the longer the model’s computational time is due to the combinatorial complexity. Thus, good data description, knowledge extraction/representation, and rule induction are crucial for developing an FL model. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing an Integrated Truth Table in Decision Tree-based FL model (ITTDTFL) that generates optimized fuzzy sets and rules. C4.5 DT is employed to extract optimized membership functions and rules using Truth Table (TT) by eliminating the redundancy of the rules. The final version of the rules is extracted from the TT and used in the FL model. We compare ITTDTFL with state-of-the-art models, including FU-RIA, RIPPER, and Decision-Tree-based FL. Experiments were conducted on real datasets of machine failure, evaluating the performances based on several factors, including the number of generated rules, accuracy, and computational time. The results demonstrate that the ITTDTFL model achieved the best performance, with an accuracy of 98.92%, less computational time outperforming the other models.
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Paper Nr: 180
Title:

Towards Efficient Quantum Anomaly Detection: One-Class SVMs Using Variable Subsampling and Randomized Measurements
Authors:

Michael Kölle, Afrae Ahouzi, Pascal Debus, Robert Müller, Daniëlle Schuman and Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Abstract: Quantum computing, with its potential to enhance various machine learning tasks, allows significant advancements in kernel calculation and model precision. Utilizing the one-class Support Vector Machine alongside a quantum kernel, known for its classically challenging representational capacity, notable improvements in average precision compared to classical counterparts were observed in previous studies. Conventional calculations of these kernels, however, present a quadratic time complexity concerning data size, posing challenges in practical applications. To mitigate this, we explore two distinct approaches: utilizing randomized measurements to evaluate the quantum kernel and implementing the variable subsampling ensemble method, both targeting linear time complexity. Experimental results demonstrate a substantial reduction in training and inference times by up to 95% and 25% respectively, employing these methods. Although unstable, the average precision of randomized measurements discernibly surpasses that of the classical Radial Basis Function kernel, suggesting a promising direction for further research in scalable, efficient quantum computing applications in machine learning.
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Paper Nr: 184
Title:

On Handling Concept Drift, Calibration and Explainability in Non-Stationary Environments and Resources Limited Contexts
Authors:

Sara Kebir and Karim Tabia
Abstract: In many real-world applications, we face two important challenges: The shift in data distribution and the concept drift on the one hand, and on the other hand, the constraints of limited computational resources, particularly in the field of IoT and edge AI. Although both challenges have been well studied separately, it is rare to tackle these two challenges together. In this paper, we put ourselves in a context of limited resources and we address the problem of the concept and distribution shift not only to ensure a good level of accuracy over time, but also we study the impact that this could have on two complementary aspects which are the confidence/calibration of the model as well as the explainability of the predictions in this context. We first propose a global framework for this problem based on incremental learning, model calibration and lightweight explainability. In particular, we propose a solution to provide feature attributions in a context of limited resources. Finally, we empirically study the impact of incremental learning on model calibration and the quality of explanations.
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Paper Nr: 192
Title:

Scalable Prediction of Atomic Candidate OWL Class Axioms Using a Vector-Space Dimension Reduced Approach
Authors:

Ali Ballout, Célia da Costa Pereira and Andrea B. Tettamanzi
Abstract: Scoring candidate axioms or assessing their acceptability against known evidence is essential for automated schema induction and can also be valuable for knowledge graph validation. However, traditional methods for accurately scoring candidate axioms are often computationally and storage expensive, making them impractical for use with large knowledge graphs. In this work, we propose a scalable method to predict the scores of atomic candidate OWL class axioms of different types. The method relies on a semantic similarity measure derived from the ontological distance between concepts in a subsumption hierarchy, as well as feature ranking and selection for vector-space dimension reduction. We train a machine learning model using our reduced vector-space, encode new candidates as a vector, and predict their scores. Extensive tests that cover a range of ontologies of various sizes and multiple parameters and settings are carried out to investigate the effectiveness and scalability of the method.
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Paper Nr: 194
Title:

Dynamically Choosing the Number of Heads in Multi-Head Attention
Authors:

Fernando F. Duarte, Nuno Lau, Artur Pereira and Luís P. Reis
Abstract: Deep Learning agents are known to be very sensitive to their parameterization values. Attention-based Deep Reinforcement Learning agents further complicate this issue due to the additional parameterization associated to the computation of their attention function. One example of this concerns the number of attention heads to use when dealing with multi-head attention-based agents. Usually, these hyperparameters are set manually, which may be neither optimal nor efficient. This work addresses the issue of choosing the appropriate number of attention heads dynamically, by endowing the agent with a policy πh trained with policy gradient. At each timestep of agent-environment interaction, πh is responsible for choosing the most suitable number of attention heads according to the contextual memory of the agent. This dynamic parameterization is compared to a static parameterization in terms of performance. The role of πh is further assessed by providing additional analysis concerning the distribution of the number of attention heads throughout the training procedure and the course of the game. The Atari 2600 videogame benchmark was used to perform and validate all the experiments.
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Paper Nr: 213
Title:

Embryo Development Stage Onset Detection by Time Lapse Monitoring Based on Deep Learning
Authors:

Wided S. Miled, Sana Chtourou, Nozha Chakroun and Khadija K. Berjeb
Abstract: In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) is a procedure used to overcome a range of fertility issues, giving many couples the chance of having a baby. Accurate selection of embryos with the highest implantation potentials is a necessary step toward enhancing the effectiveness of IVF. The detection and determination of pronuclei number during the early stages of embryo development in IVF treatments help embryologists with decision-making regarding valuable embryo selection for implantation. Current manual visual assessment is prone to observer subjectivity and is a long and difficult process. In this study, we build a CNN-LSTM deep learning model to automatically detect pronuclear-stage in IVF embryos, based on Time-Lapse Images (TLI) of their early development stages. The experimental results proved possible the automation of pronuclei determination as the proposed deep learning based method achieved a high accuracy of 85% in the detection of pronuclear-stage embryo.
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Paper Nr: 226
Title:

Diversifying Knowledge Enhancement of Biomedical Language Models Using Adapter Modules and Knowledge Graphs
Authors:

Juraj Vladika, Alexander Fichtl and Florian Matthes
Abstract: Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) owe their success to pre-training language models on large amounts of unstructured data. Still, there is an increasing effort to combine the unstructured nature of LMs with structured knowledge and reasoning. Particularly in the rapidly evolving field of biomedical NLP, knowledge-enhanced language models (KELMs) have emerged as promising tools to bridge the gap between large language models and domain-specific knowledge, considering the available biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) curated by experts over the decades. In this paper, we develop an approach that uses lightweight adapter modules to inject structured biomedical knowledge into pre-trained language models (PLMs). We use two large KGs, the biomedical knowledge system UMLS and the novel biochemical ontology OntoChem, with two prominent biomedical PLMs, PubMedBERT and BioLinkBERT. The approach includes partitioning knowledge graphs into smaller subgraphs, fine-tuning adapter modules for each subgraph, and combining the knowledge in a fusion layer. We test the performance on three downstream tasks: document classification, question answering, and natural language inference. We show that our methodology leads to performance improvements in several instances while keeping requirements in computing power low. Finally, we provide a detailed interpretation of the results and report valuable insights for future work.
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Paper Nr: 229
Title:

An Optimised Ensemble Approach for Multivariate Multi-Step Forecasts Using the Example of Flood Levels
Authors:

Michel Spils and Sven Tomforde
Abstract: Deep Learning methods have become increasingly popular for time-series forecasting in recent years. One common way of improving time-series forecasts is to use ensembles. By combining forecasts of different models, for example calculating the mean forecast, it is possible to get an ensemble that performs better than each single member. This paper suggests a method of aggregating ensemble forecasts using another neural network.The focus is on multivariate multi-step ahead forecasting. Experiments are done on 5 water levels at small to medium-sized rivers and show improvements on naive ensembles and single neural networks.
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Paper Nr: 238
Title:

Parameter-Free Undersampling for Multi-Label Data
Authors:

Sarbani Palit and Payel Sadhukhan
Abstract: This work presents a novel undersampling scheme to tackle the imbalance problem in multi-label datasets. We use the principles of the natural nearest neighborhood and follow a paradigm of label-specific undersam-pling. Natural-nearest neighborhood is a parameter-free principle. Our scheme’s novelty lies in exploring the parameter-optimization-free natural nearest neighborhood principles. The class imbalance problem is particularly challenging in a multi-label context, as the imbalance ratio and the majority-minority distributions vary from label to label. Consequently, the majority-minority class overlaps also vary across the labels. Working on this aspect, we propose a framework where a single natural neighbor search is sufficient to identify all the label-specific overlaps. Natural neighbor information is also used to find the key lattices of the majority class (which we do not undersample). The performance of the proposed method, NaNUML, indicates its ability to mitigate the class-imbalance issue in multi-label datasets to a considerable extent. We could also establish a statistically superior performance over other competing methods several times. An empirical study involving twelve real-world multi-label datasets, seven competing methods, and four evaluating metrics - shows that the proposed method effectively handles the class-imbalance issue in multi-label datasets. In this work, we have presented a novel label-specific undersampling scheme, NaNUML, for multi-label datasets. NaNUML is based on the parameter-free natural neighbor search and the key factor, neighborhood size ’k’ is determined without invoking any parameter optimization.
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Paper Nr: 241
Title:

Efficient and Flexible Topic Modeling Using Pretrained Embeddings and Bag of Sentences
Authors:

Johannes Schneider
Abstract: Pre-trained language models have led to a new state-of-the-art in many NLP tasks. However, for topic modeling, statistical generative models such as LDA are still prevalent, which do not easily allow incorporating contextual word vectors. They might yield topics that do not align well with human judgment. In this work, we propose a novel topic modeling and inference algorithm. We suggest a bag of sentences (BoS) approach using sentences as the unit of analysis. We leverage pre-trained sentence embeddings by combining generative process models and clustering. We derive a fast inference algorithm based on expectation maximization, hard assignments, and an annealing process. The evaluation shows that our method yields state-of-the art results with relatively little computational demands. Our method is also more flexible compared to prior works leveraging word embeddings, since it provides the possibility to customize topic-document distributions using priors. Code and data is at https://github.com/JohnTailor/BertSenClu.
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Paper Nr: 242
Title:

A Survey of Deep Learning: From Activations to Transformers
Authors:

Johannes Schneider and Michalis Vlachos
Abstract: Deep learning has made tremendous progress in the last decade. A key success factor is the large amount of architectures, layers, objectives, and optimization techniques. They include a myriad of variants related to attention, normalization, skip connections, transformers and self-supervised learning schemes – to name a few. We provide a comprehensive overview of the most important, recent works in these areas to those who already have a basic understanding of deep learning. We hope that a holistic and unified treatment of influential, recent works helps researchers to form new connections between diverse areas of deep learning. We identify and discuss multiple patterns that summarize the key strategies for many of the successful innovations over the last decade as well as works that can be seen as rising stars. We also include a discussion on recent commercially built, closed-source models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s PaLM 2.
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Paper Nr: 244
Title:

DGDNN: Decoupled Graph Diffusion Neural Network for Stock Movement Prediction
Authors:

Zinuo You, Zijian Shi, Hongbo Bo, John Cartlidge, Li Zhang and Yan Ge
Abstract: Forecasting future stock trends remains challenging for academia and industry due to stochastic inter-stock dynamics and hierarchical intra-stock dynamics influencing stock prices. In recent years, graph neural networks have achieved remarkable performance in this problem by formulating multiple stocks as graph-structured data. However, most of these approaches rely on artificially defined factors to construct static stock graphs, which fail to capture the intrinsic interdependencies between stocks that rapidly evolve. In addition, these methods often ignore the hierarchical features of the stocks and lose distinctive information within. In this work, we propose a novel graph learning approach implemented without expert knowledge to address these issues. First, our approach automatically constructs dynamic stock graphs by entropy-driven edge generation from a signal processing perspective. Then, we further learn task-optimal dependencies between stocks via a generalized graph diffusion process on constructed stock graphs. Last, a decoupled representation learning scheme is adopted to capture distinctive hierarchical intra-stock features. Experimental results demonstrate substantial improvements over state-of-the-art baselines on real-world datasets. Moreover, the ablation study and sensitivity study further illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in modeling the time-evolving inter-stock and intra-stock dynamics.
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Paper Nr: 246
Title:

Spiral Drawing Test and Explainable Convolutional Neural Networks for Parkinson’s Disease Detection
Authors:

Francesco Mercaldo, Luca Brunese, Mario Cesarelli, Fabio Martinelli and Antonella Santone
Abstract: There is no definitive test for Parkinson’s disease, and the rate of misdiagnosis, particularly when made by individuals without specialized training, is significantly elevated. The spiral drawing test is a clinical assessment tool used to evaluate fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and tremor in individuals, particularly those with neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. In this test, a person is typically asked to trace or draw a spiral pattern on a piece of paper or a digital tablet. The test measures the smoothness and steadiness of their hand movements. Any irregularities or tremors in the drawn spiral can provide valuable information to healthcare professionals in diagnosing or monitoring conditions like Parkinson’s disease, essential tremors, or other movement disorders. In this paper, we provide a method aimed at automatically analyse spiral drawing tests to understand whether a subject is affected by Parkinson’s disease. We employ two different Convolu-tional Neural Networks: DenseNet and ResNet50, by obtaining an accuracy equal to 0.96 in the evaluation of a dataset composed of 3,991 spiral drawing tests, thus showing the effectiveness of the proposed method. Moreover, with the aim to provide a kind of explainability behind the model prediction, the proposed method is able to visualise, directly on the spiral drawing test image, the areas of the test image that from the model point of view are related to Parkinson’s disease.
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Paper Nr: 255
Title:

ALISE: An Automated Literature Screening Engine for Research
Authors:

Hendrik Roth and Carsten Lanquillon
Abstract: The screening process needs the most time of a literature review. An automated approach saves a lot of time, making it easier for researchers to review literature. Most current approaches do not consider the full text for screening, which can cause the exclusion of relevant papers. The Automated LIterature Screening Engine (ALISE) performs full-text screening based on a research question about the retrieved papers of the literature search. With an average of 61.87% nWSS and a median of 74.38% nWSS, ALISE can save time for reviewers but cannot be used without human screening afterwards. Furthermore, ALISE is sensitive to the given research question(s).
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Paper Nr: 269
Title:

Predicting Major Donor Prospects Using Machine Learning
Authors:

Greg Lee, Aishwarya V. Sathyamurthi and Mark Hobbs
Abstract: An important concern for many fundraising institutions is major gift fundraising. Major gifts are large gifts (typically $10,000+) and donors who give these gifts are called major donors. Depending upon the institution type, major gifts can constitute 80% of donation dollars. Thus, being able to predict who will give a major gift is crucial for fundraising institutions. We sought the most useful major donor prospect model by experimenting with 11 shallow and deep learning algorithms. A useful model discovers major donor prospects (i.e., false positives) without generating a similar number of false negatives, helping to preserve accuracy. The study also examined the impact of using different types of data, such as donation data exclusively, on the model’s utility. Notably, an LSTM-GRU model achieved a 92.2% accuracy rate with 110 false positive prospects and 40 false negatives for a religious fundraising institution. This model could assist major donor officers in identifying potential major donors. Similarly, for an education fundraising institution, an extra trees classifier was able to generate a major donor model with 92.5% accuracy, 71 false positives and 40 false negatives. False positives are prospects for fundraising institutions, providing major gift officers potential major donors.
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Paper Nr: 275
Title:

Depth-Enhanced 3D Deep Learning for Strawberry Detection and Widest Region Identification in Polytunnels
Authors:

Gabriel Lins Tenorio, Weria Khaksar and Wouter Caarls
Abstract: This paper presents an investigation into the use of 3D Deep Learning models for enhanced strawberry detection in polytunnels. We focus on two main tasks: firstly, fruit detection, comparing the standard MaskRCNN and an adapted version that integrates depth information (MaskRCNN-D), both capable of classifying strawberries based on their maturity (ripe, unripe) and health status (affected by disease or fungus); secondly, for the identification of the widest region of strawberries, we compare a contour-based algorithm with an enhanced version of the VGG-16 model. Our findings demonstrate that integrating depth data into the MaskRCNN-D results in up to a 13.7% improvement in mean Average Precision (mAP) from 0.81 to 0.92 across various strawberry test sets, including simulated ones, emphasizing the model’s effectiveness in both real-world and simulated agricultural scenarios. Furthermore, our end-to-end pipeline approach, which combines the fruit detection (MaskRCNN-D) and widest region identification models (enhanced VGG-16), shows a remarkably low localization error, achieving down to 11.3 pixels of Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) in a 224 × 224 strawberry cropped image. This pipeline integration, combining the strengths of both models, provides the most effective result, enabling their application in autonomous fruit monitoring systems.
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Paper Nr: 288
Title:

Learning Occlusions in Robotic Systems: How to Prevent Robots from Hiding Themselves
Authors:

Jakob Nazarenus, Simon Reichhuber, Manuel Amersdorfer, Lukas Elsner, Reinhard Koch, Sven Tomforde and Hossam Abbas
Abstract: In many applications, robotic systems are monitored via camera systems. This helps with monitoring automated production processes, anomaly detection, and the refinement of the estimated robot’s pose via optical tracking systems. While providing high precision and flexibility, the main limitation of such systems is their line-of-sight constraint. In this paper, we propose a lightweight solution for automatically learning this occluded space to provide continuously observable robot trajectories. This is achieved by an initial autonomous calibration procedure and subsequent training of a simple neural network. During operation, this network provides a prediction of the visibility status with a balanced accuracy of 90% as well as a gradient that leads the robot to a more well-observed area. The prediction and gradient computations run with sub-ms latency and allow for modular integration into existing dynamic trajectory-planning algorithms to ensure high visibility of the desired target.
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Paper Nr: 309
Title:

On Learning Bipolar Gradual Argumentation Semantics with Neural Networks
Authors:

Caren Al Anaissy, Sandeep Suntwal, Mihai Surdeanu and Srdjan Vesic
Abstract: Computational argumentation has evolved as a key area in artificial intelligence, used to analyze aspects of thinking, making decisions, and conversing. As a result, it is currently employed in a variety of real-world contexts, from legal reasoning to intelligence analysis. An argumentation framework is modelled as a graph where the nodes represent arguments and the edges of the graph represent relations (i.e., supports, attacks) between nodes. In this work, we investigate the ability of neural network methods to learn a gradual bipolar argumentation semantics, which allows for both supports and attacks. We begin by calculating the acceptability degrees for graph nodes. These scores are generated using Quantitative Argumentation Debate (QuAD) argumentation semantics. We apply this approach to two benchmark datasets: Twelve Angry Men and Debate-pedia. Using this data, we train and evaluate the performance of three benchmark architectures: Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Graph Convolution Network (GCN), and Graph Attention Network (GAT) to learn the acceptability degree scores produced by the QuAD semantics. Our results show that these neural network methods can learn bipolar gradual argumentation semantics. The models trained on GCN architecture perform better than the other two architectures underscoring the importance of modelling argumentation graphs explicitly. Our software is publicly available at: https://github.com/clulab/icaart24-argumentation.
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Paper Nr: 321
Title:

A Coachable Parser of Natural Language Advice
Authors:

Christodoulos Ioannou and Loizos Michael
Abstract: We present a system for parsing advice offered by a human to a machine. The advice is given in the form of conditional sentences in natural language, and the system generates a logic-based (machine-readable) rep-resentation of the advice, as appropriate for use by the machine in a downstream task. The system utilizes a “white-box” knowledge-based translation policy, which can be acquired iteratively in a developmental manner through a coaching process. We showcase this coaching process by demonstrating how linguistic annotations of sentences can be combined, through simple logic-based expressions, to carry out the translation task.
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Paper Nr: 325
Title:

Multiple Relations Classification Using Imbalanced Predictions Adaptation
Authors:

Sakher K. Alqaaidi, Elika Bozorgi and Krzysztof J. Kochut
Abstract: The relation classification task assigns the proper semantic relation to a pair of subject and object entities; the task plays a crucial role in various text mining applications, such as knowledge graph construction and entities interaction discovery in biomedical text. Current relation classification models employ additional procedures to identify multiple relations in a single sentence. Furthermore, they overlook the imbalanced predictions pattern. The pattern arises from the presence of a few valid relations that need positive labeling in a relatively large predefined relations set. We propose a multiple relations classification model that tackles these issues through a customized output architecture and by exploiting additional input features. Our findings suggest that handling the imbalanced predictions leads to significant improvements, even on a modest training design. The results demonstrate superiority performance on benchmark datasets commonly used in relation classification. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first that recognizes the imbalanced predictions within the relation classification task.
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Paper Nr: 327
Title:

EAPC: Emotion and Audio Prior Control Framework for the Emotional and Temporal Talking Face Generation
Authors:

Xuan-Nam Cao, Quoc-Huy Trinh, Quoc-Anh Do-Nguyen, Van-Son Ho, Hoai-Thuong Dang and Minh-Triet Tran
Abstract: Generating realistic talking faces from audio input is a challenging task with broad applications in fields such as film production, gaming, and virtual reality. Previous approaches, employing a two-stage process of converting audio to landmarks and then landmarks to a face, have shown promise in creating vivid videos. However, they still face challenges in maintaining consistency due to misconnections between information from the previous audio frame and the current audio frame, leading to the generation of unnatural landmarks. To address this issue, we propose EAPC, a framework that incorporates features from previous audio frames with the current audio feature and the current facial landmark. Additionally, we introduce the Dual-LSTM module to enhance emotion control. By doing so, our framework improves the temporal aspects and emotional information of the audio input, allowing our model to capture speech dynamics and produce more coherent animations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate consistent landmarks, resulting in more realistic and synchronized faces, leading to the achievement of our competitive results with state-of-the-art methods. The implementation of our method will be made publicly available upon publication.
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Paper Nr: 331
Title:

Machine Learning-Based Optimization of E-Commerce Advertising Campaigns
Authors:

Arti Jha, Pratyut Sharma, Ritik Upmanyu, Yashvardhan Sharma and Kamlesh Tiwari
Abstract: E-commerce platforms facilitate the generation of advertisement campaigns by retailers for the purpose of promoting their products. Marketers need to generate demand for their products by means of online advertising (ad). Game theoretic and continuous experimentation feedback-based advertising optimization is imperative to enable efficient and effective advertising at scale. To address this, we propose a solution that utilizes machine learning and statistical techniques to optimize e-commerce ad campaigns, intending to create an optimal and targeted ad campaign strategy. The dataset utilized here is Amazon’s e-commerce dataset obtained from a prominent e-commerce firm. The proposed work examines these key approaches: For predicting profitability and campaign impressions, we implemented a model using the first approach, blending statistical techniques with machine-learning algorithms. The results provide a comparison between the algorithms, offering insights into the observed outcomes. In the second approach, we leverage the k-means clustering algorithm and Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) technique to establish a correlation between keyword performance, campaign profitability, and bidding strategies. In the concluding approach, we introduce an innovative model that uses Joint Probability Distribution and Gaussian functions to determine the profitability of ad campaigns. This model generates multivariate-density graphs, enabling a comprehensive exploration to better comprehend and predict profitability, specifically in terms of Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). For example, we can now answer questions like: How do the profitability (ROAS) and awareness (%impression share) of a campaign change with variations in the budget? How do the profitability (ROAS) and awareness (%impression share) of a keyword change with different bid values? These insights provide valuable information for optimizing campaign performance and making informed decisions regarding budget allocation, bid adjustments, and overall campaign structure. The results offer practical insights for optimizing an ad campaign’s performance through developing effective and targeted strategies.
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Paper Nr: 351
Title:

I-AM-Bird: A Deep Learning Approach to Detect Amazonian Bird Species in Residential Environments
Authors:

Lucas F. Zampar and Clay Palmeira da Silva
Abstract: The Amazon presents several challenges, such as recognizing and monitoring its birdlife. It is known that bird records are shared by many bird watchers in citizen science initiatives, including by residents who observe birds feeding at their home feeders. In this context, the work proposed an approach based on deep learning to automatically detect species of Amazonian birds that frequent residential feeders. To this end, a data set consisting of 940 images captured by 3 webcams installed in a residential feeder was collected. In total, 1,836 birds of 5 species were recorded and annotated. Then, we used the dataset to train different configurations of the Faster R-CNN detector. Considering the IoU threshold at 50%, the best model achieved an mAP of 98.33%, an mean precision of 95.96%, and an mean recall of 98.82%. The results also allow us to drive future works to develop a monitoring system for these species in a citizen science initiative.
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Paper Nr: 354
Title:

Evaluating Data Augmentation Techniques for Coffee Leaf Disease Classification
Authors:

Adrian Gheorghiu, Iulian-Marius Tăiatu, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel, Iuliana Marin and Florin Pop
Abstract: The detection and classification of diseases in Robusta coffee leaves are essential to ensure that plants are healthy and the crop yield is kept high. However, this job requires extensive botanical knowledge and much wasted time. Therefore, this task and others similar to it have been extensively researched subjects in image classification. Regarding leaf disease classification, most approaches have used the more popular PlantVillage dataset while completely disregarding other datasets, like the Robusta Coffee Leaf (RoCoLe) dataset. As the RoCoLe dataset is imbalanced and does not have many samples, fine-tuning of pre-trained models and multiple augmentation techniques need to be used. The current paper uses the RoCoLe dataset and approaches based on deep learning for classifying coffee leaf diseases from images, incorporating the pix2pix model for segmentation and cycle-generative adversarial network (CycleGAN) for augmentation. Our study demonstrates the effectiveness of Transformer-based models, online augmentations, and CycleGAN augmentation in improving leaf disease classification. While synthetic data has limitations, it complements real data, enhancing model performance. These findings contribute to developing robust techniques for plant disease detection and classification.
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Paper Nr: 355
Title:

Second-Order Learning with Grounding Alignment: A Multimodal Reasoning Approach to Handle Unlabelled Data
Authors:

Arnab Barua, Mobyen U. Ahmed, Shaibal Barua, Shahina Begum and Andrea Giorgi
Abstract: Multimodal machine learning is a critical aspect in the development and advancement of AI systems. However, it encounters significant challenges while working with multimodal data, where one of the major issues is dealing with unlabelled multimodal data, which can hinder effective analysis. To address the challenge, this paper proposes a multimodal reasoning approach adopting second-order learning, incorporating grounding alignment and semi-supervised learning methods. The proposed approach illustrates using unlabelled vehicular telemetry data. During the process, features were extracted from unlabelled telemetry data using an autoencoder and then clustered and aligned with true labels of neurophysiological data to create labelled and unlabelled datasets. In the semi-supervised approach, the Random Forest (RF) and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) algorithms are applied to the labelled dataset, achieving a test accuracy of over 97%. These algorithms are then used to predict labels for the unlabelled dataset, which is later added to the labelled dataset to retrain the model. With the additional prior labelled data, both algorithms achieved a 99% test accuracy. Confidence in predictions for unlabelled data was validated using counting samples based on the prediction score and Bayesian probability. RF and XGBoost scored 91.26% and 97.87% in counting samples and 98.67% and 99.77% in Bayesian probability, respectively.
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Paper Nr: 356
Title:

Analysis of the Effectiveness of Large Language Models in Assessing Argumentative Writing and Generating Feedback
Authors:

Daisy C. Albuquerque da Silva, Carlos Eduardo de Mello and Ana B. Garcia
Abstract: This study examines the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 in the evaluation of argumentative writing, particularly opinion articles authored by military school students. It explores the potential of LLMs to provide instant, personalized feedback across different writing stages and assesses their effectiveness compared to human evaluators. The study utilizes a detailed rubric to guide the LLM evaluation, focusing on competencies from topic choice to bibliographical references. Initial findings suggest that GPT-4 can consistently evaluate technical and structural aspects of writing, offering reliable feedback, especially in the References category. However, its conservative classification approach may underestimate article quality, indicating a need for human oversight. The study also uncovers GPT-4’s challenges with nuanced and contextual elements of opinion writing, evident from variability in precision and low recall in recognizing complete works. These findings highlight the evolving role of LLMs as supplementary tools in education that require integration with human judgment to enhance argumentative writing and critical thinking in academic settings.
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Paper Nr: 358
Title:

LIDL4Oliv: A Lightweight Incremental Deep Learning Model for Classifying Olive Diseases in Images
Authors:

Emna Guermazi, Afef Mdhaffar, Mohamed Jmaiel and Bernd Freisleben
Abstract: We present LIDL4Oliv, a novel lightweight incremental deep learning model for classifying olive diseases in images. LIDL4Oliv is first trained on a novel annotated dataset of images with complex background. Then, it learns from a large-scale deep learning model, following a knowledge distillation approach. Finally, LIDL4Oliv is successfully deployed as a cross-platform application on resource-limited mobile devices, such as smartphones. The deployed deep learning can detect olive leaves in images and classify their states as healthy or unhealthy, i.e., affected by one of the two diseases “Aculus Olearius” and “Peacock Spot”. Our mobile application supports the collection of real data during operation, i.e., the training dataset is continuously augmented by newly collected images of olive leaves. Furthermore, our deep learning model is retrained in a continuous manner, whenever a new set of data is collected. LIDL4Oliv follows an incremental update process. It does not ignore the knowledge of the previously deployed model, but it (1) incorporates the current weights of the deployed model and (2) employs fine-tuning and knowledge distillation to create an enhanced incremental lightweight deep learning model. Our conducted experiments show the impact of using our complex background dataset to improve the classification results. They demonstrate the effect of using knowledge distillation in enhancing the performance of the deployed model on resource-limited devices.
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Paper Nr: 360
Title:

Towards the Use of AI-Based Tools for Systematic Literature Review
Authors:

Lotfi Souifi, Nesrine Khabou, Ismael B. Rodriguez and Ahmed H. Kacem
Abstract: The constant growth in the number of published research studies and their rapid rate of publication creates a significant challenge in identifying relevant studies for unbiased systematic reviews. To address this challenge, artificial intelligence (AI) methods have been used since 2016 to improve the efficiency of scientific review and synthesis. Nevertheless, the growth in the number of AI-powered tools dedicated to processing text-based data has been remarkable since the introduction of generative pre-trained transformers by OpenAI in late 2022. Moreover, alongside this development, ChatGPT, a language model that provides a user-friendly chatbot interface, was introduced. The incorporation of this interactive feature has greatly enhanced the capability of developers and end-users alike to effectively utilize and access ChatGPT. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of six AI-based tools namely Chatpdf, Pdf2gpt, Hipdf, SciSpace, Easy-peasy AI, and DocAnalyzer AI, developed utilizing ChatGPT technology. These tools will be evaluated in a specific scenario where they are automated to carry out a particular step within a Systematic Literature Review. Furthermore, the limitations associated with each tool will be analyzed, and strategies will be proposed to overcome them. Additionally, this study aims to provide recommendations for researchers who intend to incorporate these tools into their research processes.
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Paper Nr: 365
Title:

A Unified Conceptual Framework Integrating UML and RL for Efficient Reconfiguration Design
Authors:

Amen Ben Hadj Ali and Samir Ben Ahmed
Abstract: The problem of early exploration of various design choices to anticipate potential runtime changes at design time for complex and highly-dynamic Reconfigurable Control Systems (RCS), is still a real challenge for designers. This paper proposes a novel conceptual framework that integrates the benefits of UML-based modeling with Reinforcement Learning (RL) to overcome this difficulty. Our proposal exploits UML diagrams enriched with OCL constraints to describe the reconfiguration controller structure and dynamics using predefined reconfiguration knowledge. On the other hand, the reconfiguration controller is designed as a RL agent (Reinforcement Learning Reconfiguration Agent or RLRA) able to improve its knowledge through online exploration while running a Q-Learning algorithm. The design process we propose starts with an abstract UML-based specification of RCS. Then, a RL-based framework in Python language will be generated from UML/OCL models by applying a generation algorithm. Finally, the resulting framework will be run to allow the RLRA learning optimized reconfiguration policies and eventually improve first design specifications with learning feedback. The learning phase supports both offline and online learning and is based on a Q-Learning algorithm.
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Paper Nr: 367
Title:

Hybrid Mechanistic Neural Network Modelling of the Degree of Cure of Polymer Composite
Authors:

Samuel Sells and Jie Zhang
Abstract: A hybrid mechanistic/neural network model was developed for the industrial polymer composite curing process of a fibre-reinforced polymer composite. A hybrid model with parallel scheme and a hybrid model with the combination of series and parallel schemes were developed. It is found that the hybrid model with the combination of series and parallel schemes gives better performance. It is shown that the developed hybrid model is more accurate than its mechanistic and neural network counterparts in predicting the degree of cure based upon the temperature and time data. The hybrid model is 7.7% and 17.1% more accurate than the neural network model and the mechanistic model respectively in terms of sum of absolute errors.
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Paper Nr: 372
Title:

Examining Decision-Making in Air Traffic Control: Enhancing Transparency and Decision Support Through Machine Learning, Explanation, and Visualization: A Case Study
Authors:

Christophe Hurter, Augustin Degas, Arnaud Guibert, Maelan Poyer, Nicolas Durand, Alexandre Veyrie, Ana Ferreira, Nicola Cavagnetto, Stefano Bonelli, Mobyen U. Ahmed, Waleed Jmoona, Shaibal Barua, Shahina Begum, Giulia Cartocci, Gianluca Di Flumeri, Gianluca Borghini, Fabio Babiloni and Pietro Aricó
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently made significant advancements and is now pervasive across various application domains. This holds true for Air Transportation as well, where AI is increasingly involved in decision-making processes. While these algorithms are designed to assist users in their daily tasks, they still face challenges related to acceptance and trustworthiness. Users often harbor doubts about the decisions proposed by AI, and in some cases, they may even oppose them. This is primarily because AI-generated decisions are often opaque, non-intuitive, and incompatible with human reasoning. Moreover, when AI is deployed in safety-critical contexts like Air Traffic Management (ATM), the individual decisions generated by AI models must be highly reliable for human operators. Understanding the behavior of the model and providing explanations for its results are essential requirements in every life-critical domain. In this scope, this project aimed to enhance transparency and explainability in AI algorithms within the Air Traffic Management domain. This article presents the results of the project’s validation conducted for a Conflict Detection and Resolution task involving 21 air traffic controllers (10 experts and 11 students) in En-Route position (i.e. hight altitude flight management). Through a controlled study incorporating three levels of explanation, we offer initial insights into the impact of providing additional explanations alongside a conflict resolution algorithm to improve decision-making. At a high level, our findings indicate that providing explanations is not always necessary, and our project sheds light on potential research directions for education and training purposes.
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Paper Nr: 392
Title:

Using Chatbot Technologies to Support Argumentation
Authors:

Luis H. Herbets de Sousa, Guilherme Trajano, Analúcia S. Morales, Stefan Sarkadi and Alison R. Panisson
Abstract: Chatbots are extensively used in modern times and are exhibiting increasingly intelligent behaviors. However, being relatively new technologies, there are significant demands for further advancement. Numerous possibilities for research exist to refine these technologies, including integration with other technologies, especially in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), which has received much attention and development. This study aims to explore the ability of chatbot technologies to classify arguments according to the reasoning patterns used to create them. As argumentation is a significant aspect of human intelligence, categorizing arguments according to various argumentation schemes (reasoning patterns) is a crucial step towards developing sophisticated human-computer interaction interfaces. This will enable agents (chatbots) to engage in more sophisticated interactions, such as argumentation processes.
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Paper Nr: 393
Title:

Spread and (Mis)use of Evaluative Expressions in Human Written and LLM-Based Generated Text
Authors:

Maurice Langner and Ralf Klabunde
Abstract: We investigate the capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate evaluative expressions in a data-driven manner. The linguistic object of investigation is the production of justified and adequate evaluative language, such that the evaluative stance of the text is motivated by the underlying data. We use the SportSett corpus for generating summaries of basketball games. The input data is converted into RDF triples that are fed into GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, prompting the models to produce game summaries using evaluative adverbs and judgemental language. We annotated the generated texts and the original summaries for their propositional content contained in the line score and box score of each game, as well as for evaluative adverbs and their polarity. The results show that the models struggle to correctly interpret the numerical data and coherently assess the quality of team-wise and player-wise performances both within games and across games, often producing contradictory evaluations and displaying the lack of global evaluative scales.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 13
Title:

Multiverse: A Deep Learning 4X4 Sudoku Solver
Authors:

Chaim Schendowich, Eyal Ben Isaac and Rina Azoulay
Abstract: This paper presents a novel deep learning-based approach to solving 4x4 Sudoku puzzles, by viewing Sudoku as a complex multi-level sequence completion problem. It introduces a neural network model, termed as ”Multiverse”, which comprises multiple parallel computational units, or ”verses”. Each unit is designed for sequence completion based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) modules. The paper’s novel perspective views Sudoku as a sequence completion task rather than a pure constraint satisfaction problem. The study generated its own dataset for 4x4 Sudoku puzzles and proposed variants of the Multiverse model for comparison and validation purposes. Comparative analysis shows that the proposed model is competitive with, and potentially superior to, state-of-the-art models. Notably, the proposed model was able to solve the puzzles in a single prediction, which offers promising avenues for further research on larger, more complex Sudoku puzzles.
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Paper Nr: 15
Title:

Which Objective Function is Solved Faster in Multi-Agent Pathfinding? It Depends
Authors:

Jiří Švancara, Dor Atzmon, Klaus Strauch, Roland Kaminski and Torsten Schaub
Abstract: Multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) is the problem of finding safe paths for multiple mobile agents within a shared environment. This problem finds practical applications in real-world scenarios like navigation, warehousing, video games, and autonomous intersections. Finding the optimal solution to MAPF is known to be computationally hard. In the literature, two commonly used cost functions are makespan and the sum of costs. To tackle this complex problem, various algorithms have been developed, falling into two main categories: search-based approaches (e.g., Conflict Based Search) and reduction-based approaches, including reduction to SAT or ASP. In this study, we empirically compare these two approaches in the context of both makespan and the sum of costs, aiming to identify situations where one cost function presents more challenges than the other. We compare our results with older studies and improve upon their findings. Despite these solving approaches initially being designed for different cost functions, we observe similarities in their behavior. Furthermore, we identify a tipping point related to the size of the environment. On smaller maps, the sum of costs is more challenging, while makespan poses greater difficulties on larger maps for both solving paradigms, defying intuitive expectations. Our study also offers insights into the reasons behind this behavior.
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Paper Nr: 16
Title:

Variance Reduction of Resampling for Sequential Monte Carlo
Authors:

Xiongming Dai and Gerald Baumgartner
Abstract: A resampling scheme provides a way to switch low-weight particles for sequential Monte Carlo with higherweight particles representing the objective distribution. The less the variance of the weight distribution is, the more concentrated the effective particles are, and the quicker and more accurate it is to approximate the hidden Markov model, especially for the nonlinear case. Normally the distribution of these particles is skewed, we propose repetitive ergodicity in the deterministic domain with the median for resampling and have achieved the lowest variances compared to the other resampling methods. As the size of the deterministic domain M ≪ N (the size of population), given a feasible size of particles under mild assumptions, our algorithm is faster than the state of the art, which is verified by theoretical deduction and experiments of a hidden Markov model in both the linear and non-linear cases.
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Paper Nr: 19
Title:

A Semi-Automatic Light-Weight Approach Towards Data Generation for a Domain-Specific FAQ Chatbot Using Human-in-the-Loop
Authors:

Anum Afzal, Tao Xiang and Florian Matthes
Abstract: Employees at large companies tend to have longer waiting times if they need company-specific information and similarly someone on the other end needs to manually address those queries. Most companies are trying to incorporate LLM-powered conversational agents to make this processing faster but often struggle to find appropriate training data, especially domain-specific data. This paper introduces a semi-automatic approach for generating domain-specific training data while leveraging a domain-expert as a human-in-the-loop for quality control. We test this approach on a HR use-case of a large organization through a retrieval-based question-answering pipeline. Additionally, we also test the effect of long context on the performance of the FAQ chat for which we employ LongT5, an Efficient Transformer. Our experiments using LongT5 show that the inclusion of the generated training data improves the performance of the FAQ chatbot during inference.
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Paper Nr: 23
Title:

Conjugate Gradient for Latent Space Manipulation
Authors:

Walid Messaoud, Rim Trabelsi, Adnane Cabani and Fatma Abdelkefi
Abstract: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have revolutionized image generation, allowing the production of high-quality images from latent codes in the latent space. However, manipulating the latent space to achieve specific image attributes remains challenging. Existing methods often lack disentanglement, leading to unintended changes in other attributes. Moreover, most of the existing techniques are limited to one-dimensional conditioning, making them less effective for complex multidimensional modifications. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that combines an auxiliary map composed of convolutional layers and Conjugate Gradient (CG) to enhance latent space manipulation. The proposed auxiliary map provides a versatile and expressive way to incorporate external information for image generation, while CG facilitates precise and controlled manipulations. Our experimental results demonstrate better performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
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Paper Nr: 30
Title:

Autonomous Drone Takeoff and Navigation Using Reinforcement Learning
Authors:

Sana Ikli and Ilhem Quenel
Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, also known as drones, are deployed in various applications such as security and surveillance. They also have the key benefit of being able to operate without a human pilot, which make them suitable to access difficult areas. During autonomous flights, drones can crash or collide with an obstacle. To prevent such situation, they need an obstacle-avoidance solution. In this work, we are interested in the navigation with obstacle avoidance of a single drone. The goal is to autonomously navigate from an origin to a destination point, including takeoff, without crashing. Reinforcement learning is a valid solution to this problem. Indeed, these approaches, coupled with deep learning, are used to tackle complex problems in robotics. However, the works in the literature using reinforcement learning for drone navigation usually simplify the problem into 2-D navigation. We propose to extend these approaches to complete 3-D navigation by using a state-of-the-art algorithm: proximal policy optimization. To create realistic drone environments, we will use a 3-D simulator called Pybullet. Results show that the drone successfully takes off and navigates to the indicated point. We provide in this paper a link to our video demonstration of the drone performing navigation tasks.
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Paper Nr: 33
Title:

A Study on Drug Similarity Measures for Predicting Drug-Drug Interactions and Severity Using Machine Learning Techniques
Authors:

Deepa Kumari
Abstract: Drug-Drug interaction (DDI) can lead to adverse reactions by decreasing the absorption rate in a patient body. The existing literature has limited focus on the impact of various similarity measures on DDI effects. This paper analyzes seven drug features (chemical substructures, targets, transporters, enzymes, side-effects, offsides, and carriers) obtained from Drugbank, Sider, TWOSIDES, and OFFSIDE databases to analyze DDI. This research examines five Machine Learning models (Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Decision Tree, KNN, ANN) on 16 different similarity measures to observe the performance of predicting samples through accuracy and AUC-curve analysis. The Jaccard similarity is chosen for further DDI prediction as it gives the best similarity score. The feature selection process (using Chi-Square) further reduces the time and space complexity. It compares combinations of every selected feature (chemical substructures, side-effects, offsides, enzymes) on Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and XGB classifiers. The results show that the Random Forest Classifier predicts DDI with the best accuracy of 72%. It also uniquely categorizes the severity level of side effects (minor, moderate, and major) due to DDI events through multi-class classification. Thus, it gives a better clinical significance to fast-track the clinical trials.
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Paper Nr: 37
Title:

Activity Recognition in Smartphones Using Non-Intrusive Sensors
Authors:

Pedro Fernandes, Cesar Analide and Bruno Fernandes
Abstract: Activity recognition using smartphones has gained increased attention in recent years due to the widespread adoption of these devices and, consequently, their various sensors. These sensors are capable of providing very relevant data for this purpose. Non-intrusive sensors, in particular, offer the advantage of collecting data without requiring the user to perform any specific action or use any additional devices. The objective of this study was, therefore, the development of an application designed for activity recognition using exclusively non-intrusive sensors available in any smartphone. The data collected by these sensors underwent several processing stages, and after numerous iterations, a set of highly favorable features for training the machine learning models was obtained. The most prominent result was achieved by the model using the XGBoost algorithm, which achieved an impressive accuracy rate of 0.979. This quite robust result confirms the high effectiveness of using this type of sensors for activity recognition.
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Paper Nr: 38
Title:

Automatic Detection and Classification of Atmospherical Fronts
Authors:

Andreea A. Ploscar, Anca I. Muscalagiu, Eduard T. Pauliuc and Adriana M. Coroiu
Abstract: This paper presents an application that uses Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for the automatic detection and classification of atmospherical fronts in synoptic maps, which are a graphical representation of weather conditions over a specific geographic area at a given point in time. These fronts are significant indicators of meteorological characteristics and are essential for weather forecasting. The proposed method takes in a region extracted from a synoptic map to detect and classify fronts as cold, warm, or mixed, setting our study apart from existing literature. Furthermore, unlike previous research that typically utilizes atmospheric data grids, our study employs synoptic maps as input data. Additionally, our model produces a single output, accurately representing the front type with a 78% accuracy rate. The CNN model was trained on data collected from various meteorological stations worldwide between 2013 and 2022. The proposed tool can provide valuable information to weather forecasters and improve their accuracy.
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Paper Nr: 44
Title:

A Formal Verification Approach to Handle Attack Graphs
Authors:

Davide Catta, Jean Leneutre, Antonina Mijatovic, Johanna Ulin and Vadim Malvone
Abstract: We propose a formalization of attack graphs through a multi-agent approach. Specifically, we focus on dynamic scenarios that capture the interaction between an attacker and defenders during a cyberattack. We introduce a formal definition of an attack graph using interpreted systems, demonstrating how this formalization enables us to express interesting security properties. Finally, we present a tool AG2IS, which we have developed as an implementation of our formal definitions, to perform the formal verification of attack graphs.
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Paper Nr: 46
Title:

Requisite Social Influence in Self-Regulated Systems
Authors:

Asimina Mertzani and Jeremy Pitt
Abstract: This paper specifies, implements and experiments with a new psychologically-inspired 4voices algorithm to be used by the units of a self-regulated system, whereby each unit learns to identify which of several “voices” to pay attention to, depending on a collective desired outcome (e.g., establishing the ground truth, a community truth, or their own “truth”). In addition, a regulator uses a standard Q-learning algorithm to pay attention to the regulated units and respond accordingly. The algorithm is applied to a problem of continuous policy-based monitoring and control, and simulation experiments determine which initial conditions produce systemic stability and what kind of “truth” is expressed by the regulated units. We conclude that this synthesis of Q-learning in the regulator and 4voices in the regulated system establishes requisite social influence . This maintains quasi-stability (i.e. periodic stability) and points the way towards ethical regulators.
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Paper Nr: 50
Title:

A Novel Metric for Measuring Data Quality in Classification Applications
Authors:

Jouseau Roxane, Salva Sébastien and Samir Chafik
Abstract: Data quality is a key element for building and optimizing good learning models. Despite many attempts to characterize data quality, there is still a need for rigorous formalization and an efficient measure of the quality from available observations. Indeed, without a clear understanding of the training and testing processes, it is hard to evaluate the intrinsic performance of a model. Besides, tools allowing to measure data quality specific to machine learning are still lacking. In this paper, we introduce and explain a novel metric to measure data quality. This metric is based on the correlated evolution between the classification performance and the deterioration of data. The proposed method has the major advantage of being model-independent. Furthermore, we provide an interpretation of each criterion and examples of assessment levels. We confirm the utility of the proposed metric with intensive numerical experiments and detail some illustrative cases with controlled and interpretable qualities.
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Paper Nr: 51
Title:

Solving Job Shop Problems with Neural Monte Carlo Tree Search
Authors:

Marco Kemmerling, Anas Abdelrazeq and Robert H. Schmitt
Abstract: Job shop scheduling is a common NP-hard problem that finds many applications in manufacturing and beyond. A variety of methods to solve job shop problems exist to address different requirements arising from individual use cases. Recently, model-free reinforcement learning is increasingly receiving attention as a method to train agents capable of scheduling. In contrast, model-based reinforcement learning is less well studied in job scheduling. However, it may be able to improve upon its model-free counterpart by dynamically spending additional planning budget to refine solutions according to the available scheduling time at any given moment. Neural Monte Carlo tree search, a family of model-based algorithms including AlphaZero is especially suitable for discrete problems such as the job shop problem. Our aim is to find suitable designs of neural Monte Carlo tree search agents for the job shop problem by systematically varying certain parameters and design components. We find that different choices for the evaluation phase of the tree search have the biggest impact on performance and conclude that agents with a combination of node value initialization using learned value functions and roll-out based evaluation lead to the most favorable performance.
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Paper Nr: 52
Title:

DiT-Head: High Resolution Talking Head Synthesis Using Diffusion Transformers
Authors:

Aaron Mir, Eduardo Alonso and Esther Mondragón
Abstract: We propose a novel talking head synthesis pipeline called ”DiT-Head,” which is based on diffusion transformers and uses audio as a condition to drive the denoising process of a diffusion model. Our method is scalable and can generalise to multiple identities while producing high-quality results. We train and evaluate our proposed approach and compare against existing methods of talking head synthesis. We show that our model can compete with these methods in terms of visual quality and lip-sync accuracy. Our results highlight the potential of our proposed approach to be used for a wide range of applications including virtual assistants, entertainment, and education. For a video demonstration of results and our user study, please refer to our supplementary material.
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Paper Nr: 55
Title:

Contextual Online Imitation Learning (COIL): Using Guide Policies in Reinforcement Learning
Authors:

Alexander Hill, Marc Groefsema, Matthia Sabatelli, Raffaella Carloni and Marco Grzegorczyk
Abstract: This paper proposes a novel method of utilising guide policies in Reinforcement Learning problems; Contextual Online Imitation Learning (COIL). This paper demonstrates that COIL can offer improved performance over both offline Imitation Learning methods such as Behavioral Cloning, and also Reinforcement Learning algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimisation which do not take advantage of existing guide policies. An important characteristic of COIL is that it can effectively utilise guide policies that exhibit expert behavior in only a strict subset of the state space, making it more flexible than classical methods of Imitation Learning. This paper demonstrates that through using COIL, guide policies that achieve good performance in sub-tasks can also be used to help Reinforcement Learning agents looking to solve more complex tasks. This is a significant improvement in flexibility over traditional Imitation Learning methods. After introducing the theory and motivation behind COIL, this paper tests the effectiveness of COIL on the task of mobile-robot navigation in both a simulation and real-life lab experiments. In both settings, COIL gives stronger results than offline Imitation Learning, Reinforcement Learning, and also the guide policy itself.
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Paper Nr: 56
Title:

Exploring Patterns and Assessing the Security of Pseudorandom Number Generators with Machine Learning
Authors:

Sara Boancă
Abstract: In recent years, Machine Learning methods have been employed for testing the security of pseudorandom number generators. It is considered that successful learning from pseudorandom data implies the existence of some detectable pattern within it, thus reducing the generator security. As the number and complexity of such approaches has reported important growth, the aim of the present paper is to synthesize current results, discuss perspectives and challenges and provide relevant guidelines for future study. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive analysis on the current state of the research into the problem of pseudorandomness exploration by means of Machine Learning.
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Paper Nr: 62
Title:

Solving Many-Objective Optimization Problems Using Selection Hyper-Heuristics
Authors:

Adeem Ali Anwar, Guanfeng Liu and Xuyun Zhang
Abstract: To effectively solve discrete optimization problems, meta-heuristics and heuristics have been used but their performance suffers drastically in the cross-domain applications. Hence, hyper-heuristics (HHs) have been used to cater to cross-domain problems. In literature, different HHs and meta-heuristics have been applied to solve the Many-objective Job-Shop Scheduling problem (MaOJSSP) and Many-objective Knapsack problem (MaOKSP) but the results are not convincing. Furthermore, no researchers have tried to solve these problems as cross-domain together using HHs. Additionally, the considered HH known as the cricket-based selection hyper-heuristic (CB-SHH) has not applied to any variation of the Job-shop scheduling problem (JSP) and the knapsack problem (KSP). This paper compares the performance of recently proposed HHs named CB-SHH, H-ACO, MARP-NSGAIII, and meta-heuristics named MPMOGA, MOEA/D on MaOKSP, MaOJSSP and benchmark problems. The performance of state-of-the-art HHs and meta-heuristics have been compared using hypervolume (HV) and µ norm. The main contribution of the paper is to effectively solve the MaOJSSP and MaOKSP using HHs and to prove the effectiveness of the best HHs on benchmark problems. It is proven through experiments that the CB-SHH is the best-performing algorithm on 44 out of 48 instances across all datasets and is the best cross-domain algorithm across the datasets.
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Paper Nr: 63
Title:

GenGradAttack: Efficient and Robust Targeted Adversarial Attacks Using Genetic Algorithms and Gradient-Based Fine-Tuning
Authors:

Naman Agarwal and James Pope
Abstract: Adversarial attacks pose a critical threat to the reliability of machine learning models, potentially undermining trust in practical applications. As machine learning models find deployment in vital domains like au-tonomous vehicles, healthcare, and finance, they become susceptible to adversarial examples—crafted inputs that induce erroneous high-confidence predictions. These attacks fall into two main categories: white-box, with full knowledge of model architecture, and black-box, with limited or no access to internal details. This paper introduces a novel approach for targeted adversarial attacks in black-box scenarios. By combining genetic algorithms and gradient-based fine-tuning, our method efficiently explores input space for perturbations without requiring access to internal model details. Subsequently, gradient-based fine-tuning optimizes these perturbations, aligning them with the target model’s decision boundary. This dual strategy aims to evolve perturbations that effectively mislead target models while minimizing queries, ensuring stealthy attacks. Results demonstrate the efficacy of GenGradAttack, achieving a remarkable 95.06% Adversarial Success Rate (ASR) on MNIST with a median query count of 556. In contrast, conventional GenAttack achieved 100% ASR but required significantly more queries. When applied to InceptionV3 and Ens4AdvInceptionV3 on ImageNet, GenGradAttack outperformed GenAttack with 100% and 96% ASR, respectively, and fewer median queries. These results highlight the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach in generating adversarial examples with reduced query counts, advancing our understanding of adversarial vulnerabilities in practical contexts.
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Paper Nr: 64
Title:

Cryptocurrency Analysis: Price Prediction of Cryptocurrency Using User Sentiments and Quantitative Data
Authors:

Dayan Perera, Jessica Lim, Shuta Gunraku and Wern H. Lim
Abstract: This research introduces an innovative approach to forecasting cryptocurrency prices by combining user-generated content (UGC) and sentiment analysis with quantitative data. The primary goal is to overcome limitations in existing methods for market forecasting, where accurate forecasting is crucial for informed decision-making and risk mitigation. The paper suggests a robust prediction methodology by integrating sentiment analysis and quantitative data. The study reviews prior research on sentiment analysis and quantitative analysis of cryptocurrency and stock price prediction. It explores the integration of machine learning and deep learning techniques, an area not extensively explored before. The methodology employs Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Bidirectional LSTM and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) models to capture temporal dependencies. Prediction accuracy is assessed using metrics including Mean Squared Error (MSE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), and a confusion matrix. Results show that GRU models excel in prediction, while RNN models outperform in predicting price movements; with an emphasis on the significance of a suitable data preprocessing pipeline towards improving model performance. In summary, this study demonstrates the effectiveness of integrating sentiment analysis and quantitative data for cryptocurrency price forecasting using UGC data.
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Paper Nr: 71
Title:

Outlier Detection in MET Data Using Subspace Outlier Detection Method
Authors:

Dupuy R. Charles, Pascal Pultrini and Andrea Tettamanzi
Abstract: In plant breeding, Multi-Environment Field Trials (MET) are commonly used to evaluate genotypes for multiple traits and to estimate their genetic breeding value using Genomic Prediction (GP). The occurrence of outliers in MET is common and is known to have a negative impact on the accuracy of the GP. Therefore, identification of outliers in MET prior to GP analysis can lead to better results. However, Outlier Detection (OD) in MET is often overlooked. Indeed, MET give rise to different level of residuals which favor the presence of swamping and masking effects where ideal sample points may be portrayed as outliers instead of the true ones. Consequently, without a sensitive and robust outlier detection algorithm, OD can be a waste of time and potentially degrade the accuracy prediction of the GP, especially when the data set is not huge. In this study, we compared various robust outlier methods from different approaches to determine which one is most suitable for identifying MET anomalies. Each method has been tested on eleven real-world MET data sets. Results are validated by injecting a proportion of artificial outliers in each set. The Subspace Outlier Detection Method stands out as the most promising among the tested methods.
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Paper Nr: 72
Title:

Hybrid Approach to Explain BERT Model: Sentiment Analysis Case
Authors:

Aroua Hedhili and Islem Bouallagui
Abstract: The increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), has raised concerns about the opacity of these ’black box’ models in decision-making processes. Explainable AI (XAI) has emerged to address this issue by making AI systems more understandable and trustworthy through various techniques. In this research paper, we deal with a new approach to explain model combining counterfactual explanations and domain knowledge visualization. Our contribution explores how domain knowledge, guided by expert decision-makers, can improve the effectiveness of counterfactual explanations. Additionally, the presented research underscores the significance of collecting user feedback to create a human-centered approach. Our experiments were conducted on a BERT model for sentiment analysis on IMDB movie reviews dataset.
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Paper Nr: 76
Title:

Joining LDA and Word Embeddings for Covid-19 Topic Modeling on English and Arabic Data
Authors:

Amina Amara, Mohamed Ali Hadj Taieb and Mohamed Ben Aouicha
Abstract: The value of user-generated content on social media platforms has been well established and acknowledged since their rich and subjective information allows for favorable computational analysis. Nevertheless, social data are often text-heavy and unstructured, thereby complicating the process of data analysis. Topic models act as a bridge between social science and unstructured social data analysis to provide new perspectives for interpreting social phenomena. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is one of the most used topic modeling techniques. However, the LDA-based topic models alone do not always provide promising results and do not consider the recent advancement in the natural language processing field by leveraging word embeddings when learning latent topics to capture more word-level semantic and syntactic regularities. In this work, we extend the LDA model by mixing the Skip-gram model with Dirichlet-optimized sparse topic mixtures to learn dense word embeddings jointly with the Dirichlet distributed latent document-level mixtures of topic vectors. The embeddings produced through the proposed model were submitted to experimental evaluation using a Covid-19 based multilingual dataset extracted from the Facebook social network. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms all compared baselines in terms of both topic quality and predictive performance.
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Paper Nr: 82
Title:

An Approach for Improving Oversampling by Filtering out Unrealistic Synthetic Data
Authors:

Nada Boudegzdame, Karima Sedki, Rosy Tspora and Jean-Baptiste Lamy
Abstract: Oversampling algorithms are commonly used in machine learning to address class imbalance by generating new synthetic samples of the minority class. While oversampling can improve classification models’ performance on minority classes, our research reveals that models often learn to detect noise generated by oversampling algorithms rather than the underlying patterns. To overcome this issue, this article proposes a method that involves identifying and filtering unrealistic synthetic data, using advanced technique such a neural network for detecting unrealistic synthetic data samples. This aims to enhance the quality of the oversampled datasets and improve machine learning models’ ability to uncover genuine patterns. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is thoroughly examined and evaluated, demonstrating enhanced model performance.
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Paper Nr: 94
Title:

Why an Automated, Scalable and Resilient Service for Semantic Interoperability is Needed
Authors:

Maximilian Stäbler, Tobias Müller, Frank Köster and Christoph Schlueter-Langdon
Abstract: The increasing linkage of different data sources and data ecosystems underlines the need for high-quality and well-structured data. Unambiguous descriptions of data (meta-data) promote a common understanding of the data among different users. New ontologies and data schemas are constantly being developed for this purpose. While there are new ways to align, merge or match these ontologies and data schemas, the context of the data, which is important for a clear understanding, is often not taken into account. This work addresses this problem by analyzing a graph consisting of 1,615 data attributes from 13 domains and 828 different ontologies. The results show how overlapping and partially synonymous ontologies, both from the same domain and from different domains, are. The results show the complexity for users in creating unique descriptions of data and why new approaches and methods are needed to achieve semantic interoperability.
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Paper Nr: 95
Title:

Comparative Analysis of Internal and External Facial Features for Enhanced Deep Fake Detection
Authors:

Fatimah Alanazi
Abstract: In the burgeoning era of deepfake technologies, the authenticity of digital media is being perpetually challenged, raising pivotal concerns regarding its veracity and the potential malicious uses of manipulated content. This study embarks on a meticulous exploration of the effectiveness of both internal and external facial features in discerning deepfake content. By conducting a thorough comparative analysis, our research illuminates the criticality of facial features, particularly those situated beyond the face’s center, in distinguishing between genuine and manipulated faces. The results elucidate that such features serve as potent indicators, thereby offering valuable insights for enhancing deepfake detection methodologies. Consequently, this research, therefore, not only underscores the paramount importance of these often-overlooked facial aspects but also contributes substantively to the domain of digital forensics, providing a nuanced understanding and innovative approaches towards advancing deepfake detection strategies. By bridging the gap between technological advancements and ethical digital media practices, this study stands as a beacon, advocating for the imperative need to safeguard the integrity of digital communications in our progressively digitized world.
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Paper Nr: 96
Title:

Seeing Through the Smoke: An Agent Architecture for Representing Health Protection Motivation Under Social Pressure
Authors:

Veronika Kurchyna, Stephanie C. Rodermund, Ye Eun Bae, Patrick Mertes, Philipp Flügger, Jan Ole Berndt and Ingo J. Timm
Abstract: Representing and emulating human decision-making processes in artificial intelligence systems is a challenging task. This is because both internal (such as attitude, perceived health or motivation) and external factors (such as the opinions of others) and their mutual interactions affect decision-making. Modelling agents capable of human-like behavior, including undesirable actions, is an interesting use case for designing different AI-systems when it comes to human-AI-interactions and similar scenarios. However, agent-based decision-models in this domain tend to reflect the complex interplay of these factors only to a limited extent. To overcome this, we enrich these approaches with an agent architecture inspired by theories from psychology and sociology. Using human health behavior, specifically smoking, as a case study, we propose an agent-based approach to combine social pressure within Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) to allow for a theory-based representation of potentially harmful behavior including both internal and external factors. Based on smoking in social settings, we present experiments to demonstrate the model’s capability to simulate human health behavior and the mutual influences between the selected concepts. In this use case, the resulting model has shown that social pressure is a driving influence in the observable system dynamics.
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Paper Nr: 97
Title:

Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Network for the Detection of Container Escape Events
Authors:

Yuchen Guo and James Pope
Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) devices bring an attack surface closer to personal life and industrial production. With containers as the primary method of IoT application deployment, detecting container escapes by analyzing audit logs can identify compromised edge devices. Since audit log data contains temporal property of events and relational information between system entities, existing analysis methods cannot comprehensively analyze these two properties. In this paper, a new Temporal Graph Neural Network (GNN) -based model was designed to detect anomalies of IoT applications in a container environment. The model employed Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and Graph Isomorphism Network (GIN) operators to capture temporal and spatial features. Using unsupervised learning to model the application’s normal behavior, the model can detect unknown anomalies that have not appeared in training. The model is trained on a dynamic graph generated from audit logs, which records security events in a system. Due to the lack of real-world datasets, we conducted experiments on a simulated dataset. Audit log records are divided into multiple graphs according to their temporal attribute to form a dynamic graph. Some nodes and edges are aggregated or removed to reduce the complexity of the graph. In the Experiments, The model has an F1 score of 0.976 on the validation set, which outperforms the best-performing baseline model, with an F1 score of 0.845.
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Paper Nr: 98
Title:

A Delay-Aware DRL-Based Environment for Cooperative Multi-UAV Systems in Multi-Purpose Scenarios
Authors:

Damiano Brunori and Luca Iocchi
Abstract: We provide a customizable environment based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) strategies for handling cooperative multi-UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) scenarios when delays are involved in the decision-making process for tasks such as spotting, tracking, coverage and many others. Users can choose among various combinations of tasks and parameters and customize the scenarios by implementing new desired functionalities. This environment provides the opportunity to compare different approaches, taking into account either implicitly or explicitly the delays applied to actions and observations. The awareness of the delay, along with the possible usage of real-world-based external files, increases the reality level of the environment by possibly easing the knowledge transferability process of the learned policy from the simulated environment to the real one. Finally, we show that use cases could generate new benchmarking tools for collaborative multi-UAV scenarios where DRL solutions must consider delays.
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Paper Nr: 101
Title:

Benchmarking Quantum Surrogate Models on Scarce and Noisy Data
Authors:

Jonas Stein, Michael Poppel, Philip Adamczyk, Ramona Fabry, Zixin Wu, Michael Kölle, Jonas Nüßlein, Daniëlle Schuman, Philipp Altmann, Thomas Ehmer, Vijay Narasimhan and Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Abstract: Surrogate models are ubiquitously used in industry and academia to efficiently approximate black box functions. As state-of-the-art methods from classical machine learning frequently struggle to solve this problem accurately for the often scarce and noisy data sets in practical applications, investigating novel approaches is of great interest. Motivated by recent theoretical results indicating that quantum neural networks (QNNs) have the potential to outperform their classical analogs in the presence of scarce and noisy data, we benchmark their qualitative performance for this scenario empirically. Our contribution displays the first application-centered approach of using QNNs as surrogate models on higher dimensional, real world data. When compared to a classical artificial neural network with a similar number of parameters, our QNN demonstrates significantly better results for noisy and scarce data, and thus motivates future work to explore this potential quantum advantage. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of current NISQ hardware experimentally and estimate the gate fidelities necessary to replicate our simulation results.
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Paper Nr: 102
Title:

GREED: Graph Learning Based Relation Extraction with Entity and Dependency Relations
Authors:

Mohamed Y. Landolsi, Lobna Hlaoua and Lotfi Ben Romdhane
Abstract: A large number of electronic medical documents are generated by specialists, containing valuable information for various medical tasks such as medical prescriptions. Extracting this information from extensive natural language text can be challenging. Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE) are key tasks in clinical information extraction. Systems often rely on machine learning and rule-based techniques. Modern methods involve dependency parsing and graph-based deep learning algorithms. However, the effectiveness of these techniques and certain features is not thoroughly studied. Additionally, it would be advantageous to properly integrate rules with deep learning models. In this paper, we introduce GREED (Graph learning based Relation Extraction with Entity and Dependency relations). GREED is based on graph classification using Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). We transform each sentence into a weighted graph via dependency parsing. Words are represented with features that capture co-occurrence, dependency type, entities, and relation verbs, with focus on the entity pair. Experiments on clinical records (i2b2/VA 2010) show that relevant features efficiently integrated with GCN achieve higher performance.
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Paper Nr: 107
Title:

New Speed Limit Recognition System: Software and Hardware Validation
Authors:

Nesrine Triki, Mohamed Karray and Mohamed Ksantini
Abstract: Recent advancements in intelligent driving have led to the integration of various automated systems into vehicles, including Speed Limit Recognition systems, which play a crucial role in enhancing road safety and autonomous driving technologies. This paper presents a comprehensive approach to Speed Limit Recognition, based on three modules: detection, classification, and the fusion of machine learning and deep learning classifiers. The proposed approach achieves impressive results, with an accuracy of 99.98% using Dempster Shafer theory and 99.96% with the voting technique. The system’s performance is rigorously evaluated through simulation and hardware validation using a Raspberry Pi 4 board. Experimental results indicate high performance rates across nine classes from the German Traffic sign Recognition Benchmark dataset in an average processing time of 0.15 seconds.
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Paper Nr: 108
Title:

Evaluating Quantum Support Vector Regression Methods for Price Forecasting Applications
Authors:

Horst Stühler, Daniel Pranjić and Christian Tutschku
Abstract: Support vector machines are powerful and frequently used machine learning methods for classification and regression tasks, which rely on the construction of kernel matrices. While crucial for the performance of this machine learning approach, choosing the most suitable kernel is highly problem-dependent. The emergence of quantum computers and quantum machine learning techniques provides new possibilities for generating powerful quantum kernels. Within this work, we solve a real-world price forecasting problem using fidelity and projected quantum kernels, which are promising candidates for the utility of near-term quantum computing. In our analysis, we examine and validate the most auspicious quantum kernels from literature and compare their performance with an optimized classical kernel. Unlike previous work on quantum support vector machines, our dataset includes categorical features that need to be encoded as numerical features, which we realize by using the one-hot-encoding scheme. One-hot-encoding, however, increases the dimensionality of the dataset significantly, which collides with the current limitations of noisy intermediate scale quantum computers. To overcome these limitations, we use autoencoders to learn a low-dimensional representation of the feature space that still maintains the most important information of the original data. To examine the impact of autoencoding, we compare the results of the encoded date with the results of the original, unencoded dataset. We could demonstrate that quantum kernels are comparable to or even better than the classical support vector machine kernels regarding the mean absolute percentage error scores for both encoded and unencoded datasets.
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Paper Nr: 111
Title:

Harnessing LLM Conversations for Goal Model Generation from User Reviews
Authors:

Shuaicai Ren, Hiroyuki Nakagawa and Tatsuhiro Tsuchiya
Abstract: User reviews are a valuable resource for developers, as the reviews contain requests for new features and bug reports. By conducting the requirements analysis of user reviews, developers can gain timely insights for the application, which is crucial for continuously enhancing user satisfaction. The goal model is a commonly used model during requirements analysis. Utilizing reviews to generate goal models can assist developers in understanding user requirements comprehensively. However, given the vast number of reviews, manually collecting reviews and creating goal models is a significant challenge. A method for clustering user reviews and automatically generating goal models has been proposed. Nevertheless, the accuracy of the goal models generated by this method is limited. To address these limitations of the existing method and enhance precision of goal model generation, we propose a goal-generation process based on Large Language Models (LLMs). This process does not directly generate goal models from user reviews; instead, it treats goal model generation as a clustering problem, allowing for the visualization of the relationship between reviews and goals. Experiments demonstrate that compared to the existing method, our LLM-based goal model generation process enhance the precision of goal model generation.
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Paper Nr: 113
Title:

Variational Quantum Circuit Design for Quantum Reinforcement Learning on Continuous Environments
Authors:

Georg Kruse, Theodora-Augustina Drăgan, Robert Wille and Jeanette Miriam Lorenz
Abstract: Quantum Reinforcement Learning (QRL) emerged as a branch of reinforcement learning (RL) that uses quantum submodules in the architecture of the algorithm. One branch of QRL focuses on the replacement of neural networks (NN) by variational quantum circuits (VQC) as function approximators. Initial works have shown promising results on classical environments with discrete action spaces, but many of the proposed architectural design choices of the VQC lack a detailed investigation. Hence, in this work we investigate the impact of VQC design choices such as angle embedding, encoding block architecture and postprocessesing on the training capabilities of QRL agents. We show that VQC design greatly influences training performance and heuristically derive enhancements for the analyzed components. Additionally, we show how to design a QRL agent in order to solve classical environments with continuous action spaces and benchmark our agents against classical feed-forward NNs.
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Paper Nr: 118
Title:

Investigation of the Performance of Different Loss Function Types Within Deep Neural Anchor-Free Object Detectors
Authors:

Ala’a Alshubbak and Daniel Görges
Abstract: In this paper, an investigation of different IoU loss functions and a spatial attention mechanism within anchor-free object detectors is presented. Two anchor-free dense predictor models are studied: FASF and FCOS models. The models are tested on two different datasets: the benchmark COCO dataset and a small dataset called OPEDD. The results show that some loss functions and using the attention mechanism outperform their original counterparts for both the huge multi-class COCO dataset and the small unity-class dataset of OPEDD. The proposed structure is tested over different backbones: ResNet-50, ResNet-101, and ResNeXt-101. The accuracy of basic models trained over the coco dataset improves by 1.3% and 1.6% mAP for the FSAF and FCOS models based on ResNet-50, respectively. On the other hand, it increases by 2.3% and 15.8% for the same models when trained on the OPEDD dataset. The effect is interpreted using a saliency map.
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Paper Nr: 121
Title:

Neural Bradley-Terry Rating: Quantifying Properties from Comparisons
Authors:

Satoru Fujii
Abstract: Many properties in the real world doesn’t have metrics and can’t be numerically observed, making them difficult to learn. To deal with this challenging problem, prior works have primarily focused on estimating those properties by using graded human scores as the target label in the training. Meanwhile, rating algorithms based on the Bradley-Terry model are extensively studied to evaluate the competitiveness of players based on their match history. In this paper, we introduce the Neural Bradley-Terry Rating (NBTR), a novel machine learning framework designed to quantify and evaluate properties of unknown items. Our method seamlessly integrates the Bradley-Terry model into the neural network structure. Moreover, we generalize this architecture further to asymmetric environments with unfairness, a condition more commonly encountered in real-world settings. Through experimental analysis, we demonstrate that NBTR successfully learns to quantify and estimate desired properties.
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Paper Nr: 124
Title:

Probabilistic Model Checking of Stochastic Reinforcement Learning Policies
Authors:

Dennis Gross and Helge Spieker
Abstract: We introduce a method to verify stochastic reinforcement learning (RL) policies. This approach is compatible with any RL algorithm as long as the algorithm and its corresponding environment collectively adhere to the Markov property. In this setting, the future state of the environment should depend solely on its current state and the action executed, independent of any previous states or actions. Our method integrates a verification technique, referred to as model checking, with RL, leveraging a Markov decision process, a trained RL policy, and a probabilistic computation tree logic (PCTL) formula to build a formal model that can be subsequently verified via the model checker Storm. We demonstrate our method’s applicability across multiple benchmarks, comparing it to baseline methods called deterministic safety estimates and naive monolithic model checking. Our results show that our method is suited to verify stochastic RL policies.
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Paper Nr: 128
Title:

Generating Products Placement in Warehouse Using BLPSO and MIQCPs
Authors:

Ayaka Sugiura, Takahiro Suzuki, Koya Ihara, Takuto Sakuma and Shohei Kato
Abstract: Expansion of the e-commerce market due to the development of the Internet has increased in the volume of distribution, and the number of operations in distribution warehouses had also increased. Picking operation is one of the most important tasks, and companies are trying to make this task more efficient by introducing autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), which transports products manually picked to a depot. In this study, we propose a method to generate product assignments that make picking operations more efficient through a two-step optimization process. First, product assignments for utilizing AMRs are generated using particle swarm optimization. Next, in-shelf products layout is generated by mathematical optimization for the products group assigned to the shelves. In product placement optimization, one of the approximate solution methods of the metaheuristic, BLPSO, is fused with a class-based warehouse to obtain an optimal solution. In addition, the problem of in-shelf product layout is formulated in MIQCPs. The constraint expression is used to generate a layout that considers preventing picking mistakes and ensuring the safety of the picker. We have conducted placement optimization experiments using real-world logistic data and discuss the effectiveness of the proposed method.
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Paper Nr: 130
Title:

A Comprehensive Analysis of Parkinson’s Disease Detection Through Inertial Signal Processing
Authors:

Manuel Gil-Martín, Sergio Esteban-Romero, Fernando Fernández-Martínez and Rubén San-Segundo
Abstract: When developing deep learning systems for Parkinson’s Disease (PD) detection using inertial sensors, a comprehensive analysis of some key factors, including data distribution, signal processing domain, number of sensors, and analysis window size, is imperative to refine tremor detection methodologies. Leveraging the PD-BioStampRC21 dataset with accelerometer recordings, our state-of-the-art deep learning architecture extracts a PD biomarker. Applying Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) magnitude coefficients as a preprocessing step improves PD detection in Leave-One-Subject-Out Cross-Validation (LOSO CV), achieving 66.90% accuracy with a single sensor and 6.4-second windows, compared to 60.33% using raw samples. Integrating information from all five sensors boosts performance to 75.10%. Window size analysis shows that 3.2-second windows of FFT coefficients from all sensors outperform shorter or longer windows, with a window-level accuracy of 80.49% and a user-level accuracy of 93.55% in a LOSO scenario.
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Paper Nr: 133
Title:

LACNN: A Deep Learning Model for Persian Question Analysis
Authors:

Fatemeh E. Khaksefidi, Afsaneh Fatemi, Mohammad A. Nematbakhsh and Mahsa A. Kia
Abstract: Question-answering systems, characterized by their three core functions of question classification, information retrieval, and answer selection, necessitate refinement to optimize their precision in retrieving exact answers. Question classification is a fundamental task that predicts the expected answer to a question. However, agglutinative languages constrained the performance of question classification algorithms, especially with inadequate and limited resources languages, such as Persian. In this paper, we proposed a multi-layer Long-short-term memory (LSTM) Attention Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)(LACNN) classifier model that extracts information from a Persian language context. The model operates autonomously without the need for previous knowledge and external features. Also, the first Persian open-domain medical question dataset, UIMQC, is proposed. UIMQC is the translation of the GARD dataset from English. The questions within UIMQC are highly technical and complex, often related to rare diseases that require diagnosis by specialists. The results showed that the model outperformed baseline methods by 9% on the UTQC dataset and achieved 67.08% accuracy on the UIMQC dataset. Therefore, we suggest the LACNN model for other morphological analysis tasks in different low-resource languages, as in Question Answering systems it improves the performance for retrieving accurate answers to the users’ queries.
Paper Nr: 134
Title:

Oral Diseases Recognition Based on Photographic Images
Authors:

Mazin S. Mohammed, Salah Zrigui and Mounir Zrigui
Abstract: Recently, the automation diagnosis process of dental caries plays a critical role in medical applications. This paper presents a new dataset of photo-graphic images for six different types of oral diseases. The dataset is gathered and labelled by professional medical operators in the dentistry field. We use the collected dataset to train a binary classifier to determine whether the region of interests (ROI) needs detection or not inside the input image. Then, we train a detector to detect and localize the required ROI. Finally, we use the detected regions to train a CNN network by adopting transfer learning technique to classify various kinds of teeth diseases. With this model, we obtained an almost 93 % accuracy by modifying and re-training the pre-trained model VGG19.
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Paper Nr: 138
Title:

Decoupling the Backward Pass Using Abstracted Gradients
Authors:

Kyle Rogers, Hao Yu, Seong-Eun Cho, Nancy Fulda, Jordan Yorgason and Tyler J. Jarvis
Abstract: In this work we introduce a novel method for decoupling the backward pass of backpropagation using mathematical and biological abstractions to approximate the error gradient. Inspired by recent findings in neuroscience, our algorithm allows gradient information to skip groups of layers during the backward pass, such that weight updates at multiple depth levels can be calculated independently. We explore both gradient abstractions using the identity matrix as well as an abstraction that we derive mathematically for network regions that consist of piecewise-linear layers (including layers with ReLU and leaky ReLU activations). We validate the derived abstraction calculation method on a fully connected network with ReLU activations. We then test both the derived and identity methods on the transformer architecture and show the capabilities of each method on larger model architectures. We demonstrate empirically that a network trained using an appropriately chosen abstraction matrix can match the loss and test accuracy of an unmodified network, and we provide a roadmap for the application of this method toward depth-wise parallelized models and discuss the potential of network modularization by this method.
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Paper Nr: 141
Title:

Flattening Based Cuckoo Search Optimization Algorithm for Community Detection in Multiplex Networks
Authors:

Randa Boukabene, Fatima Benbouzid-Si Tayeb and Narimene Dakiche
Abstract: Complex network analysis is a thriving research field, with a particular focus on community detection. This paper addresses the challenge of community detection in multiplex networks, which model multiple types of relationships to reflect reality. Our approach consists of two key steps. First, we employ multiplex network flattening techniques to transform it into a one-dimensional network. Second, we introduce a cuckoo search-based algorithm to maximize the modularity function and identify the best network partitions. Our algorithm strategically combines the continuous aspects of the standard cuckoo search algorithm with the discrete nature of community detection, to achieve better results. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world multiplex networks demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach.
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Paper Nr: 143
Title:

Advanced Deep Learning Techniques for Industry 4.0: Application to Mechanical Design and Structural Health Monitoring
Authors:

Fakhreddine Ababsa
Abstract: Nowadays, Deep Learning (DL) techniques are increasingly employed in industrial applications. This paper investigate the development of data-driven models for two use cases: Additive Manufacturing-driven Topology Optimization and Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). We first propose an original data-driven generative method that integrates the mechanical and geometrical constraints concurrently at the same conceptual level and generates a 2D design accordingly. In this way, it adapts the geometry of the design to the manufacturing criteria, allowing the designer better interpretation and avoiding being stuck in a time-consuming loop of drawing the CAD and testing its performance. On the other hand, SHM technique is dedicated to the continuous and non-invasive monitoring of structures integrity, ensuring safety and optimal performances through on-site real-time measurements. We propose in this work new ways of structuring data that increase the accuracy of data driven SHM algorithms and that are based on the physical knowledge related with the structure to be inspected. We focus our study on the damage classification step within the aeronautic context, where the primary objective is to distinguish between different damage types in composite plates. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.
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Paper Nr: 149
Title:

A Novel Image Steganography Method Based on Spatial Domain with War Strategy Optimization and Reed Solomon Model
Authors:

Hassan J. Azooz, Khawla Ben Salah, Monji Kherallah and Mohamed S. Naceur
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel approach to steganography using the War Search Optimization (WSO) algorithm. Steganography is the practice of concealing messages within other data, such as images or audio files. Our approach employs the WSO algorithm to optimize the parameters of a steganography algorithm, aiming to maximize the perceptual similarity between the cover image and the stego image. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a variety of cover images and secret messages and show that our method produces stego images with high perceptual similarity to the cover images. Our results suggest that the WSO algorithm is a promising tool for optimizing steganography algorithms. Also, this paper presents a new approach to steganography that utilizes the War Search Optimization (WSO) algorithm. Steganography involves hiding messages within other data, such as images or audio files. Our method applies the WSO algorithm to optimize the parameters of a steganography algorithm with the goal of maximizing the perceptual similarity between the cover image and the stego image. We evaluate our approach on various cover images and secret messages and demonstrate that our technique generates stego images with high perceptual similarity to the cover images. The results indicate that the WSO algorithm is a valuable tool for optimizing steganography algorithms.
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Paper Nr: 156
Title:

From Targets to Rewards: Continuous Target Sets in the Algorithmic Search Framework
Authors:

Milo Knell, Sahil Rane, Forrest Bicker, Tiger Che, Alan Wu and George D. Montañez
Abstract: Many machine learning tasks have a measure of success that is naturally continuous, such as error under a loss function. We generalize the Algorithmic Search Framework (ASF), used for modeling machine learning domains as discrete search problems, to the continuous space. Moving from discrete target sets to a continuous measure of success extends the applicability of the ASF by allowing us to model fundamentally continuous notions like fuzzy membership. We generalize many results from the discrete ASF to the continuous space and prove novel results for a continuous measure of success. Additionally, we derive an upper bound for the expected performance of a search algorithm under arbitrary levels of quantization in the success measure, demonstrating a negative relationship between quantization and the performance upper bound. These results improve the fidelity of the ASF as a framework for modeling a range of machine learning and artificial intelligence tasks.
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Paper Nr: 161
Title:

System-Call-Level Dynamic Analysis for Code Translation Candidate Selection
Authors:

Narumi Yoneda, Ryo Hatano and Hiroyuki Nishiyama
Abstract: In this study, we propose a methodology that uses dynamic analysis (DA) data to select better code-translation candidates. For the DA data, we recorded the history of system-call invocations to understand the actions of the program during execution, providing insights independent of the programming language. We implemented and publicized a DA system, which enabled a fully automated analysis. In our method, we generated multiple translation candidates for programming languages using TransCoder. Subsequently, we performed DA on all the generated candidates and original code. For optimal selection, we compared the DA data of the original code with the generated data and calculated the similarity. To compare the DA data, we used natural language processing techniques on DA data to fix the sequence length. We also attempted to directly compare the variable-length system-call sequences. In this study, we demonstrated that the characteristics of system-call invocations vary even within the same code. For instance, the order of invocations and the number of times the same system-calls an invocation differ. We discuss the elimination of these uncertainties when comparing system-calls.
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Paper Nr: 164
Title:

Dynamic Path Planning for Autonomous Vehicles: A Neuro-Symbolic Approach
Authors:

Omar Elrasas, Nourhan Ehab, Yasmin Mansy and Amr El Mougy
Abstract: The rise of autonomous vehicles has transformed transportation, promising safer and more efficient mobility. Dynamic path planning is crucial in autonomous driving, requiring real-time decisions for navigating complex environments. Traditional approaches, like rule-based methods or pure machine learning, have limitations in addressing these challenges. This paper explores integrating Neuro-Symbolic Artificial Intelligence (AI) for dynamic path planning in self-driving cars, creating two regression models with the Logic Tensor Networks (LTN) Neuro-Symbolic framework. Tested on the CARLA simulator, the project effectively followed road lanes, avoided obstacles, and adhered to speed limits. Root mean square deviation (RMSE) gauged the LTN models’ performance, revealing significant improvement, particularly with small datasets, showcasing Neuro-Symbolic AI’s data efficiency. However, LTN models had longer training times compared to linear and XGBoost regression models.
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Paper Nr: 167
Title:

Explainability Insights to Cellular Simultaneous Recurrent Neural Networks for Classical Planning
Authors:

Michaela Urbanovská and Antonín Komenda
Abstract: The connection between symbolic artificial intelligence and statistical machine learning has been explored in many ways. That includes using machine learning to learn new heuristic functions for navigating classical planning algorithms. Many approaches which target this task use different problem representations and different machine learning techniques to train estimators for navigating search algorithms to find sequential solutions to deterministic problems. In this work, we focus on one of these approaches which is the semantically layered Cellular Simultaneous Neural Network architecture (slCSRN) (Urbanovská and Komenda, 2023) used to learn heuristic for grid-based planning problems represented by the semantically layered representation. We create new problem domains for this architecture - the Tetris and Rush-Hour domains. Both do not have an explicit agent that only modifies its surroundings unlike already explored problem domains. We compare the performance of the trained slCSRN to the existing classical planning heuristics and we also provide insights into the slCSRN computation as we provide explainability analysis of the learned heuristic functions.
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Paper Nr: 171
Title:

Knowledge-Aware Object Detection in Traffic Scenes
Authors:

Jean-Francois Nies, Syed Tahseen Raza Rizvi, Mohsin Munir, Ludger V. Elst and Andreas Dengel
Abstract: Autonomous driving is a widely popular domain that empowers the autonomous vehicle to make crucial decisions in a constantly evolving traffic scenario. The role of perception is pivotal in the secure operation of the autonomous vehicle in a complex traffic scene. Recently, several approaches have been proposed for the task of object detection. In this paper, we demonstrate that the concept of Semantic Consistency and the ensuing method of Knowledge-Aware Re-Optimization can be adapted for the problem of object detection in intricate traffic scenes. Moreover, we also introduce a novel method for extracting a knowledge graph encoding the semantic relationship between the traffic participants from an autonomous driving dataset. We also conducted an investigation into the efficacy of utilizing diverse knowledge graph generation methodologies and in- and out-domain knowledge sources on the efficacy of the outcomes. Finally, we investigated the effectiveness of knowledge-aware re-optimization on the Faster-RCNN and DETR object detection models. Results suggest that modest but consistent improvements in precision and recall can be achieved using this method.
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Paper Nr: 176
Title:

Adaptive Questionnaire Design Using AI Agents for People Profiling
Authors:

Ciprian Paduraru, Rares Cristea and Alin Stefanescu
Abstract: Creating employee questionnaires, surveys or evaluation forms for people to understand various aspects such as motivation, improvement opportunities, satisfaction, or even potential cybersecurity risks is a common practice within organizations. These surveys are usually not tailored to the individual and have a set of predetermined questions and answers. The objective of this paper is to design AI agents that are flexible and adaptable in choosing the survey content for each individual according to their personality. The developed framework is open source, generic and can be adapted to many use cases. For the evaluation, we present a real-world use case of detecting potentially inappropriate behavior in the workplace. The results obtained are promising and suggest that the decision algorithms for content selection approaches and personalized surveys via AI agents are similar to a real human resource manager in our use case.
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Paper Nr: 178
Title:

Designing Algorithms for the Shortest Path Reconfiguration Problem Using Decision Diagram Operations
Authors:

Shou Ooba, Jun Kawahara and Shin-ichi Minato
Abstract: This paper proposes decision diagram (DD)-based algorithms for the (edge-unweighted) shortest s-t path reconfiguration problem. In the problem, given a graph and two shortest s-t paths, the task is to decide whether one shortest path can be transformed into the other one by repeatedly applying the reconfiguration rule to the path, where the reconfiguration rule is to change one vertex of the path at a time while maintaining shortest s-t paths. We propose several DD-based algorithms for the problem and confirm their performance by computer experiments. We succeeded in finding a shortest reconfiguration sequence with length 961,012 in 629.0 seconds for some instance.
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Paper Nr: 182
Title:

Disentangling Quantum and Classical Contributions in Hybrid Quantum Machine Learning Architectures
Authors:

Michael Kölle, Jonas Maurer, Philipp Altmann, Leo Sünkel, Jonas Stein and Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Abstract: Quantum computing offers the potential for superior computational capabilities, particularly for data-intensive tasks. However, the current state of quantum hardware puts heavy restrictions on input size. To address this, hybrid transfer learning solutions have been developed, merging pre-trained classical models, capable of handling extensive inputs, with variational quantum circuits. Yet, it remains unclear how much each component – classical and quantum – contributes to the model’s results. We propose a novel hybrid architecture: instead of utilizing a pre-trained network for compression, we employ an autoencoder to derive a compressed version of the input data. This compressed data is then channeled through the encoder part of the autoencoder to the quantum component. We assess our model’s classification capabilities against two state-of-the-art hybrid transfer learning architectures, two purely classical architectures and one quantum architecture. Their accuracy is compared across four datasets: Banknote Authentication, Breast Cancer Wisconsin, MNIST digits, and AudioMNIST. Our research suggests that classical components significantly influence classification in hybrid transfer learning, a contribution often mistakenly ascribed to the quantum element. The performance of our model aligns with that of a variational quantum circuit using amplitude embedding, positioning it as a feasible alternative.
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Paper Nr: 183
Title:

Using Ensemble Models for Malicious Web Links Detection
Authors:

Claudia-Ioana Coste
Abstract: Web technology advances faster than humans can adapt to it and develop the proper online skills. Most users are not experienced enough to have a good online knowledge on how to protect their data. Thus, many people can become vulnerable to threats. The most common online attacks are through malicious web links, which can deceive users into clicking them and running malicious code. The present approach proposed to advance the field of malicious web links detection through ensemble models by developing a nature-inspired ensemble. Our methodology is tested against two datasets, and we conduct an additional calibration step for all the models. For the first database, we managed to improve the detection accuracy from other solutions, by achieving 97.05%. In the case of the second dataset, our empirical strategy is not accurate enough, reaching just 91.12% accuracy. The proposed ensemble is heterogeneous, having a weight voting mechanism, where weights are generated with the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm. To build the ensemble we compared 12 individual machine learning models, including Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine, Adaptive Boosting, Random Forest, Decision Tree, K-Nearest Neighbor, Perceptron, Nearest Centroid, Passive Aggressive Classifier, Stochastic Gradient Descent, KMeans, and different variants for Naive Bayes.
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Paper Nr: 191
Title:

A Unique Training Strategy to Enhance Language Models Capabilities for Health Mention Detection from Social Media Content
Authors:

Pervaiz I. Khan, Muhammad N. Asim, Andreas Dengel and Sheraz Ahmed
Abstract: An ever-increasing amount of social media content requires advanced AI-based computer programs capable of extracting useful information. Specifically, the extraction of health-related content from social media is useful for the development of diverse types of applications including disease spread, mortality rate prediction, and finding the impact of diverse types of drugs on diverse types of diseases. Language models are competent in extracting the syntactic and semantics of text. However, they face a hard time extracting similar patterns from social media texts. The primary reason for this shortfall lies in the non-standardized writing style commonly employed by social media users. Following the need for an optimal language model competent in extracting useful patterns from social media text, the key goal of this paper is to train language models in such a way that they learn to derive generalized patterns. The key goal is achieved through the incorporation of random weighted perturbation and contrastive learning strategies. On top of a unique training strategy, a meta predictor is proposed that reaps the benefits of 5 different language models for discriminating posts of social media text into non-health and health-related classes. Comprehensive experimentation across 3 public benchmark datasets reveals that the proposed training strategy improves the performance of the language models up to 3.87%, in terms of F1-score, as compared to their performance with traditional training. Furthermore, the proposed meta predictor outperforms existing health mention classification predictors across all 3 benchmark datasets.
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Paper Nr: 199
Title:

ConEX: A Context-Aware Framework for Enhancing Explanation Systems
Authors:

Yasmeen Khaled and Nourhan Ehab
Abstract: Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have led to the widespread adoption of intricate AI models, raising concerns about their opaque decision-making. Explainable AI (XAI) is crucial for improving transparency and trust. However, current XAI approaches often prioritize AI experts, neglecting broader stakeholder requirements. This paper introduces a comprehensive context taxonomy and ConEX, an adaptable framework for context-sensitive explanations. ConEX includes explicit problem-solving knowledge and contextual insights, allowing tailored explanations for specific contexts. We apply the framework to personalize movie recommendations by aligning explanations with user profiles. Additionally, we present an empirical user study highlighting diverse preferences for contextualization depth in explanations, highlighting the importance of catering to these preferences to foster trust and satisfaction in AI systems.
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Paper Nr: 201
Title:

Action Duration Generalization for Exact Multi-Agent Collective Construction
Authors:

Martin Rameš and Pavel Surynek
Abstract: This paper addresses exact approaches to multi-agent collective construction problem which tasks a group of cooperative agents to build a given structure in a blocksworld under the gravity constraint. We propose a generalization of the existing exact model based on mixed integer linear programming by accommodating varying agent action durations. We refer to the model as a fraction-time model. The introduction of action durations enables one to create a more realistic model for various domains. It provides a significant reduction of plan execution duration at the cost of increased computational time, which rises steeply the closer the model gets to the exact real-world action duration. We also propose a makespan estimation function for the fraction-time model. This can be used to estimate the construction time reduction size for cost-benefit analysis. The fraction-time model and the makespan estimation function have been evaluated in a series of experiments using a set of benchmark structures. The results show a significant reduction of plan execution duration for non-constant duration actions due to decreasing synchronization overhead at the end of each action. According to the results, the makespan estimation function provides a reasonably accurate estimate of the makespan.
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Paper Nr: 202
Title:

Facial Expression-Based Drowsiness Detection System for Driver Safety Using Deep Learning Techniques
Authors:

Amina Turki, Sirine Ammar, Mohamed Karray and Mohamed Ksantini
Abstract: Driver drowsiness is a leading cause of road accidents, resulting in severe physical injuries, fatalities, and substantial economic losses. To address this issue, a sophisticated Driver Drowsiness Detection (DDD) system is needed to alert the driver in case of abnormal behaviour and prevent potential catastrophes. The proposed DDD system calculates the Eyes Closure Ratio (ECR) and Mouth Opening Ratio (MOR) using the Chebyshev distance, instead of the classical Euclidean distance, to model the driver’s behaviour and to detect drowsiness states. This system uses simple camera and deep transfer learning techniques to detect the driver’s drowsiness state and then alert the driver in real time situations. The system achieves 96% for the VGG19 model, and 98% for the ResNet50 model, with a precision rate of 98% in assessing the driver’s dynamics.
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Paper Nr: 208
Title:

Inferring Interpretable Semantic Cognitive Maps from Noisy Document Corpora
Authors:

Yahya Emara, Tristan Weger, Ryan Rubadue, Rishabh Choudhary, Simona Doboli and Ali A. Minai
Abstract: With the emergence of deep learning-based semantic embedding models, it has become possible to extract large-scale semantic spaces from text corpora. Semantic elements such as words, sentences and documents can be represented as embedding vectors in these spaces, allowing their use in many applications. However, these semantic spaces are very high-dimensional and the embedding vectors are hard to interpret for humans. In this paper, we demonstrate a method for obtaining more meaningful, lower-dimensional semantic spaces, or cognitive maps, through the semantic clustering of the high-dimensional embedding vectors obtained from a real-world corpus. A key limitation in this is the presence of semantic noise in real-world document corpora. We show that pre-filtering the documents for semantic relevance can alleviate this problem, and lead to highly interpretable cognitive maps.
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Paper Nr: 211
Title:

A Machine Learning Approach Using Interpretable Models for Predicting Success of NCAA Basketball Players to Reach NBA
Authors:

Dante A. Costa, Joseana M. Fechine, José S. Brito, João R. Ferro, Evandro B. Costa and Roberta V. Lopes
Abstract: Predictive models in machine learning and knowledge discovery in databases have been used in various application domains, including sports and basketball, in the context of the National Basketball Association (NBA), where one can find relevant predictive issues. In this paper, we apply supervised machine learning to examine historical and statistical data and features from players in the NCAA basketball league, addressing the prediction problem of automatically identifying NCAA basketball players with an excellent chance of reaching the NBA and becoming successful. This problem is not easy to resolve; among other difficulties, many factors and high uncertainty can influence basketball players’ success in the mentioned context. One of our main motivations for addressing this predicting problem is to provide decision-makers with relevant information, helping them to improve their hiring judgment. To this end, we aim to have the advantage of producing an interpretable prediction model representation and satisfactory accuracy levels, therefore, considering a trade-off between Interpretability and Predictive Accuracy, we have invested in white-box classification methods, such as induction of decision trees, as well as logistic regression. However, as a baseline, we have considered a relevant method as a reference for the black-box model. Furthermore, in our approach, we explored these methods combined with genetic algorithms to improve their predictive accuracy and promote feature reduction. The results have been thoroughly compared, and models exhibiting superior performance have been emphasized, revealing predictive accuracy differences between the best white box and black box models were very small. The pairing of the genetic algorithm and logistic regression was particularly noteworthy, outperforming other models’ predictive accuracy and significant feature reduction, assisting the interpretability of the results. Furthermore, the analysis also highlighted which features were most important in the model.
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Paper Nr: 212
Title:

Mobile Agents-Based Framework for Dynamic Resource Allocation in Cloud Computing
Authors:

Safia Rabaaoui, Héla Hachicha and Ezzeddine Zagrouba
Abstract: Nowadays, cloud computing is becoming the more popular technology for various companies and consumers, who benefit from its increased efficiency, cost optimization, data security, unlimited storage capacity, etc. One of the biggest challenges of cloud computing is resource allocation. Its efficiency directly influences the performance of the whole cloud environment. Finding an effective method to address these critical issues and increase cloud performance was necessary. This paper proposes a mobile agents-based framework for dynamic resource allocation in cloud computing to minimize the cost of virtual machines and the makespan. Furthermore, its impact on the best response time and task rejection rate has been studied. The simulation shows that our method gave better results than the former ones.
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Paper Nr: 215
Title:

Out of the Cage: How Stochastic Parrots Win in Cyber Security Environments
Authors:

Maria Rigaki, Ondřej Lukáš, Carlos Catania and Sebastian Garcia
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained widespread popularity across diverse domains involving text generation, summarization, and various natural language processing tasks. Despite their inherent limitations, LLM-based designs have shown promising capabilities in planning and navigating open-world scenarios. This paper introduces a novel application of pre-trained LLMs as agents within cybersecurity network environments, focusing on their utility for sequential decision-making processes. We present an approach wherein pre-trained LLMs are leveraged as attacking agents in two reinforcement learning environments. Our proposed agents demonstrate similar or better performance against state-of-the-art agents trained for thousands of episodes in most scenarios and configurations. In addition, the best LLM agents perform similarly to human testers of the environment without any additional training process. This design highlights the potential of LLMs to address complex decision-making tasks within cybersecurity efficiently. Furthermore, we introduce a new network security environment named NetSecGame. The environment is designed to support complex multi-agent scenarios within the network security domain eventually. The proposed environment mimics real network attacks and is designed to be highly modular and adaptable for various scenarios.
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Paper Nr: 217
Title:

Explainability-Driven Leaf Disease Classification Using Adversarial Training and Knowledge Distillation
Authors:

Sebastian-Vasile Echim, Iulian-Marius Tăiatu, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel and Florin Pop
Abstract: This work focuses on plant leaf disease classification and explores three crucial aspects: adversarial training, model explainability, and model compression. The models’ robustness against adversarial attacks is enhanced through adversarial training, ensuring accurate classification even in the presence of threats. Leveraging explainability techniques, we gain insights into the model’s decision-making process, improving trust and transparency. Additionally, we explore model compression techniques to optimize computational efficiency while maintaining classification performance. Through our experiments, we determine that on a benchmark dataset, the robustness can be the price of the classification accuracy with performance reductions of 3%-20% for regular tests and gains of 50%-70% for adversarial attack tests. We also demonstrate that a student model can be 15-25 times more computationally efficient for a slight performance reduction, distilling the knowledge of more complex models.
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Paper Nr: 218
Title:

Compressing UNSAT CDCL Trees with Caching
Authors:

Anthony Blomme, Daniel L. Berre, Anne Parrain and Olivier Roussel
Abstract: We aim at providing users of SAT solvers with small, easily understandable proofs of unsatisfiability. Caching techniques have been proposed to identify redundant subproofs and reduce the size of some UNSAT proof trees. Branches are pruned when they correspond to subformulas that were proved unsatisfiable earlier in the tree. A caching mechanism based on subgraph isomorphism was proposed as postprocessing step both in the DPLL and CDCL architectures but the technique could only be integrated during the search on the DPLL architecture. This paper presents how to integrate such caching mechanism during the search for the CDCL case and presents a generalized caching mechanism for that architecture.
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Paper Nr: 223
Title:

Evaluating Large Language Models in Semantic Parsing for Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs
Authors:

Phillip Schneider, Manuel Klettner, Kristiina Jokinen, Elena Simperl and Florian Matthes
Abstract: Conversational question answering systems often rely on semantic parsing to enable interactive information retrieval, which involves the generation of structured database queries from a natural language input. For information-seeking conversations about facts stored within a knowledge graph, dialogue utterances are transformed into graph queries in a process that is called knowledge-based conversational question answering. This paper evaluates the performance of large language models that have not been explicitly pre-trained on this task. Through a series of experiments on an extensive benchmark dataset, we compare models of varying sizes with different prompting techniques and identify common issue types in the generated output. Our results demonstrate that large language models are capable of generating graph queries from dialogues, with significant improvements achievable through few-shot prompting and fine-tuning techniques, especially for smaller models that exhibit lower zero-shot performance.
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Paper Nr: 224
Title:

Fair and Equitable Machine Learning Algorithms in Healthcare: A Systematic Mapping
Authors:

Marcelo S. Mattos, Sean M. Siqueira and Ana B. Garcia
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) is being employed in many fields, including healthcare. While AI has the potential to improve people’s lives, it also raises ethical questions about fairness and bias. This article reviews the challenges and proposed solutions for promoting fairness in medical decisions aided by AI algorithms. A systematic mapping study was conducted, analyzing 37 articles on fairness in machine learning in healthcare from five sources: ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, PubMed, ScienceDirect, and Scopus. The analysis reveals a growing interest in the field, with many recent publications. The study offers an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of approaches and limitations for evaluating and mitigating biases, unfairness, and discrimination in healthcare-focused machine learning algorithms. This study’s findings provide valuable insights for developing fairer, equitable, and more ethical AI systems for healthcare.
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Paper Nr: 227
Title:

Autonomous Methods in Multisensor Architecture for Smart Surveillance
Authors:

Dani Manjah, Stéphane Galland, Christophe De Vleeschouwer and Benoît Macq
Abstract: This paper considers the deployment of flexible and high-performance surveillance systems. These systems must continuously integrate new sensors and sensing algorithms, which are autonomous (e.g., capable of making decisions independently of a central system) and possess interaction skills (e.g., capable of exchanging observations). For this purpose, our work proposes adopting an agent-based architecture derived from an organizational and holonic (i.e., system of systems) multi-agent model. It leverages autonomous processing methods, resulting in a scalable and modular multisensor and multimethod surveillance systems. A vehicle tracking case study demonstrates the relevance of our approach in terms of effectiveness and runtime.
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Paper Nr: 230
Title:

Medi-CAT: Contrastive Adversarial Training for Medical Image Classification
Authors:

Pervaiz I. Khan, Andreas Dengel and Sheraz Ahmed
Abstract: There are not many large medical image datasets available. Too small deep learning models can’t learn useful features, so they don’t work well due to underfitting, and too big models tend to overfit the limited data. As a result, there is a compromise between the two issues. This paper proposes a training strategy to overcome the aforementioned issues in medical imaging domain. Specifically, it employs a large pre-trained vision transformers to overcome underfitting and adversarial and contrastive learning techniques to prevent overfitting. The presented method has been trained and evaluated on four medical image classification datasets from the MedMNIST collection. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of the method by improving the accuracy up-to 2% on three benchmark datasets compared to well-known approaches and up-to 4.1% over the baseline methods. Code can be accessed at: https://github.com/pervaizniazi/medicat.
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Paper Nr: 237
Title:

Class Anchor Margin Loss for Content-Based Image Retrieval
Authors:

Alexandru Ghita and Radu T. Ionescu
Abstract: Loss functions play a major role in influencing the effectiveness of neural networks in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). Existing loss functions can be categorized into metric learning and statistical learning. Metric learning often lacks efficiency due to pair mining, while statistical learning does not yield compact features. To this end, we introduce a novel repeller-attractor loss based on metric learning, which directly optimizes the L2 metric, without pair generation. Our novel loss comprises three terms: one to ensure features are attracted to class anchors, one that enforces anchor separability, and one that prevents anchor collapse. We evaluate our objective, applied to both convolutional and transformer architectures, on CIFAR-100, Food-101, SVHN, and ImageNet-200, showing that it outperforms existing functions in CBIR.
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Paper Nr: 239
Title:

A Toolset for Constraint Programming
Authors:

Thibault Falque and Romain Wallon
Abstract: Constraint Programming (CP) allows solving combinatorial problems across various domains. Numerous solvers and tools have been developed in this area. However, their interoperability is often limited. This paper presents a suite of tools for constraint programming, consisting of a solver interface and a remote control application. The solver interface offers a unified API for interacting with different solvers of various programming languages. Based on this API, we present a remote control system enabling to configure the solver and to observe and analyze its behaviour while it is running.
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Paper Nr: 245
Title:

A Description Language for Similarity, Belief Change and Trust
Authors:

Aaron Hunter
Abstract: We introduce a simple framework for describing and reasoning about situations where an agent receives information reported from external sources, and these reports cause them to change their beliefs. Our framework is inspired by classic action description languages, which use sets of causal statments to specify action effects in terms of transition systems. We suggest that this style of language can effectively capture important properties of similarity and trust, which are required to perform belief revision in practical settings. The language introduced in this paper allows us to specify a similarity relation on states, and it also allows us to explicitly associate an incoming report with a specific formula to be used as the input for a suitable belief revision operator. The result is a flexible framework that can describe a variety of belief change functions, and it can also capture the trust that is held in the reporting agent in a simple and transparent way. We demonstrate the connection with existing trust-influenced models of belief change. We then consider a speculative application where we apply our framework to reason about the correctness of trusted third party protocols. Directions for future work are considered.
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Paper Nr: 251
Title:

A Novel Partitioning Approach for Real-Time Scheduling of Mixed-Criticality Systems
Authors:

Hayfa Ben Abdallah, Hamza Gharsellaoui and Sadok Bouamama
Abstract: In real-time system (RTSys), a program is split into small tasks and distributed among several computing elements to minimize the overall system cost. Intrinsically, tasks allocation problem is NP- hard. To overcome this issue, it is necessary to introduce heuristics for generating near optimal solution to the given problem. This paper deals with the problem of dependent and periodic tasks to be assigned to different cores interconnected by a network-on-chip (NoC) in such a way that the load on each Core is almost acceptable. Further, the development of an effective algorithm for allocating ‘N’ tasks to ‘P’ cores. The system using task clustering to reduce the Communication Cost on the NoC. Experiment results and simulations demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.
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Paper Nr: 252
Title:

SynCRF: Syntax-Based Conditional Random Field for TRIZ Parameter Minings
Authors:

Guillaume Guarino, Ahmed Samet and Denis Cavallucci
Abstract: Conditional random fields (CRF) are widely used for sequence labeling such as Named Entity Recognition (NER) problems. Most CRFs, in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, model the dependencies between predicted labels without any consideration for the syntactic specificity of the document. Unfortunately, these approaches are not flexible enough to consider grammatically rich documents like patents. Additionally, the position and the grammatical class of the words may influence the text’s understanding. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce SynCRF which considers grammatical information to compute pairwise potentials. Syn-CRF is applied to TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving), which offers a comprehensive set of tools to analyze and solve problems. TRIZ aims to provide users with inventive solutions given technical contradiction parameters. SynCRF is applied to mine these parameters from patent documents. Experiments on a labeled real-world dataset of patents show that SynCRF outperforms state-of-the-art and baseline approaches.
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Paper Nr: 258
Title:

Enhancing Manufacturing Quality Prediction Models Through the Integration of Explainability Methods
Authors:

Dennis Gross, Helge Spieker, Arnaud Gotlieb and Ricardo Knoblauch
Abstract: This research presents a method that utilizes explainability techniques to amplify the performance of machine learning (ML) models in forecasting the quality of milling processes, as demonstrated in this paper through a manufacturing use case. The methodology entails the initial training of ML models, followed by a fine-tuning phase where irrelevant features identified through explainability methods are eliminated. This procedural refinement results in performance enhancements, paving the way for potential reductions in manufacturing costs and a better understanding of the trained ML models. This study highlights the usefulness of explainability techniques in both explaining and optimizing predictive models in the manufacturing realm.
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Paper Nr: 259
Title:

Hybrid PSO-Based Rule Classifier for Disease Detection
Authors:

Cecilia Mariciuc and Madalina Raschip
Abstract: The application of data mining techniques in healthcare is common because the decision-making process for the diagnosis of medical conditions could benefit from the information extracted. A decision system must not only be accurate but also provide understandable explanations for its reasoning. Rule-based models seek to find a small set of rules that can effectively categorize data while providing great human readability. Rule discovery is a complex optimization problem, making it a good candidate for the application of PSO, a versatile, intuitive search algorithm. In this paper, a particle swarm optimization algorithm is used for learning classification rules as part of a Covering-based rule classifier. The proposed PSO is hybridized with the Iterated Local Search metaheuristic, and association rules are used as part of the initialization step. The classifier is tested on several unbalanced medical disease datasets with different types of attributes to more faithfully reflect real-world data. When compared with state-of-the-art rule-based classifiers, the studied algorithm shows good results and is highly interpretable.
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Paper Nr: 267
Title:

Quantum Federated Learning for Image Classification
Authors:

Leo Sünkel, Philipp Altmann, Michael Kölle and Thomas Gabor
Abstract: Federated learning is a technique in classical machine learning in which a global model is collectively trained by a number of independent clients, each with their own datasets. Using this learning method, clients are not required to reveal their dataset as it remains local; clients may only exchange parameters with each other. As the interest in quantum computing and especially quantum machine learning is steadily increasing, more concepts and approaches based on classical machine learning principles are being applied to the respective counterparts in the quantum domain. Thus, the idea behind federated learning has been transferred to the quantum realm in recent years. In this paper, we evaluate a straightforward approach to quantum federated learning using the widely used MNIST dataset. In this approach, we replace a classical neural network with a variational quantum circuit, i.e., the global model as well as the clients are trainable quantum circuits. We run three different experiments which differ in number of clients and data-subsets used. Our results demonstrate that basic principles of federated learning can be applied to the quantum domain while still achieving acceptable results. However, they also illustrate that further research is required for scenarios with increasing number of clients.
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Paper Nr: 268
Title:

AccidentGPT: Large Multi-Modal Foundation Model for Traffic Accident Analysis
Authors:

Kebin Wu, Wenbin Li and Xiaofei Xiao
Abstract: Traffic accident analysis is pivotal for enhancing public safety and developing road regulations. Traditional approaches, although widely used, are often constrained by manual analysis processes, subjective decisions, uni-modal outputs, as well as privacy issues related to sensitive data. This paper introduces the idea of AccidentGPT, a foundation model of traffic accident analysis, which incorporates multi-modal input data to automatically reconstruct the accident process video with dynamics details, and furthermore provide multi-task analysis with multi-modal outputs. The design of the AccidentGPT is empowered with a multi-modality prompt with feedback for task-oriented adaptability, a hybrid training schema to leverage labelled and unla-belled data, and a edge-cloud split configuration for data privacy. To fully realize the functionalities of this model, we proposes several research opportunities. This paper serves as the stepping stone to fill the gaps in traditional approaches of traffic accident analysis and attract the research community’s attention for automatic, objective, and privacy-preserving traffic accident analysis.
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Paper Nr: 274
Title:

RLAR: A Reinforcement Learning Abductive Reasoner
Authors:

Mostafa ElHayani
Abstract: Machine learning (ML) algorithms are the foundation of the modern AI environment. They are renowned for their capacity to solve complicated problems and generalize across a wide range of datasets. Nevertheless, a noteworthy disadvantage manifests itself as a lack of explainability. Symbolic AI is at the other extreme of the spectrum; in this case, every inference is a proof, allowing for transparency and traceability throughout the decision-making process. This paper proposes the Reinforcement Learning Abductive Reasoner (RLAR). A combination of modern and symbolic AI algorithms aimed to bridge the gap and utilize the best features of both methods. A case study has been chosen to test the implementation of the proposed reasoner. A knowledge-base (KB) vectorization step is implemented, and a Machine Learning model architecture is built to learn explanation inference. Furthermore, a simple abductive reasoner is also implemented to compare both approaches.
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Paper Nr: 278
Title:

SIFT-ResNet Synergy for Accurate Scene Word Detection in Complex Scenarios
Authors:

Riadh Harizi, Rim Walha and Fadoua Drira
Abstract: Scene text detection is of growing importance due to its various applications. Deep learning-based systems have proven effective in detecting horizontal text in natural scene images. However, they encounter difficulties when confronted with oriented and curved text. To tackle this issue, our study introduces a hybrid scene text detector that combines selective search with SIFT-based keypoint density analysis and a deep learning training architecture framework. More precisely, we investigated SIFT keypoints to identify important areas in an image for precise word localization. Then, we fine-tuned these areas with a deep learning-powered bounding box regressor. This combination ensured accurate word boundary alignment and enhancing word detection efficiency. We evaluated our method on benchmark datasets, including ICDAR2013, ICDAR2015, and SVT, comparing it with established state-of-the-art scene text detectors. The results underscore the strong performance of our scene text detector when dealing with complex scenarios.
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Paper Nr: 280
Title:

Digital Twin and Foundation Models: A New Frontier
Authors:

Athanasios Trantas and Paolo Pileggi
Abstract: A Foundation Model (FM) possesses extensive learning capabilities; it learns from diverse datasets. This is our opportunity to enhance the functionality of Digital Twin (DT) solutions in various sectors. The integration of FMs into the DT application is particularly relevant due to the increased prevalence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in real-world applications. In this position paper, we begin to explain a novel perspective on this integration by exploring the potential of enhanced predictive analytics, adaptive learning, and improved handling of complex data within DTs — by way of designated purposes. Ultimately, we aim to uncover hidden value of enhanced reliable decision-making, whereby systems can make more informed, accurate and timely decisions, based on comprehensive data analytics and predictive insights. Mentioning selected ongoing cases, we highlight some benefits and challenges, like computational demand, data privacy concerns, and the need for transparency in AI decision-making. Underscoring the transformative implications of integrating FMs into the DT paradigm, a shift towards more intelligent, versatile and dynamic systems becomes clearer. We caution against the challenges of computational resources, safety considerations and interpretability. This step is pivotal towards unlocking unprecedented potential for advanced data-driven solutions in various industries.
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Paper Nr: 286
Title:

F4D: Factorized 4D Convolutional Neural Network for Efficient Video-Level Representation Learning
Authors:

Mohammad Al-Saad, Lakshmish Ramaswamy and Suchendra Bhandarkar
Abstract: Recent studies have shown that video-level representation learning is crucial to the capture and understanding of the long-range temporal structure for video action recognition. Most existing 3D convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods for video-level representation learning are clip-based and focus only on short-term motion and appearances. These CNN-based methods lack the capacity to incorporate and model the long-range spatiotemporal representation of the underlying video and ignore the long-range video-level context during training. In this study, we propose a factorized 4D CNN architecture with attention (F4D) that is capable of learning more effective, finer-grained, long-term spatiotemporal video representations. We demonstrate that the proposed F4D architecture yields significant performance improvements over the conventional 2D, and 3D CNN architectures proposed in the literature. Experiment evaluation on five action recognition benchmark datasets, i.e., Something-Something-v1, Something-Something-v2, Kinetics-400, UCF101, and HMDB51 demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed F4D network architecture for video-level action recognition.
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Paper Nr: 290
Title:

Explainable Deep Semantic Segmentation for Flood Inundation Mapping with Class Activation Mapping Techniques
Authors:

Jacob Sanderson, Hua Mao, Naruephorn Tengtrairat, Raid R. Al-Nima and Wai L. Woo
Abstract: Climate change is causing escalating extreme weather events, resulting in frequent, intense flooding. Flood inundation mapping is a key tool in com-bating these flood events, by providing insight into flood-prone areas, allowing for effective resource allocation and preparation. In this study, a novel deep learning architecture for the generation of flood inundation maps is presented and compared with several state-of-the-art models across both Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery, where it demonstrates consistently superior performance, with an Intersection Over Union (IOU) of 0.5902 with Sentinel-1, and 0.6984 with Sentinel-2 images. The importance of this versatility is underscored by visual analysis of images from each satellite under different weather conditions, demonstrating the differing strengths and limitations of each. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is leveraged to interpret the decision-making of the model, which reveals that the proposed model not only provides the greatest accuracy but exhibits an improved ability to confidently identify the most relevant areas of an image for flood detection.
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Paper Nr: 291
Title:

Is Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics Suitable as Core for an Event Processing Network Model?
Authors:

Arne Koschel, Irina Astrova, Anna Pakosch, Christian Gerner, Christin Schulze and Matthias Tyca
Abstract: This article looks at a proposed list of generalized requirements for a unified modelling of event processing networks (EPNs) and its application to Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics. It enhances our previous work in this area, in which we recently analyzed Apache Storm and earlier also the EPiA model, the BEMN model, and the RuleCore model. Our proposed EPN requirements look at both: The logical model of EPNs and the concrete technical implementation of them. Therefore, our article provides requirements for EPN models based on attributes derived from event processing in general as well as existing models. Moreover, as its core contribution, our article applies those requirements by an in depth analysis of Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics as a concrete implementation foundation of an EPN model.
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Paper Nr: 292
Title:

A Quantitative Assessment Framework for Modelling and Evaluation Using Representation Learning in Smart Agriculture Ontology
Authors:

Khadija Meghraoui, Teeradaj Racharak, Kenza A. El Kadi, Saloua Bensiali and Imane Sebari
Abstract: Understanding agricultural processes and their interactions can be improved with trustworthy and precise models. Such modelling boosts various related tasks, making it easier to take informed decisions in the realm of advanced agriculture. In our study, we present a novel agriculture ontology, primarily focusing on crop production. Our ontology captures fundamental domain knowledge concepts and their interconnections, particularly pertaining to key environmental factors. It encompasses static aspects like soil features, and dynamic ones such as climatic and thermal traits. In addition, we propose a quantitative framework for evaluating the quality of the ontology using the embeddings of all the concept names, role names, and individuals based on representation learning (i.e. OWL2Vec*, RDF2Vec, and Word2Vec) and dimensionality reduction for visualization (i.e. t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding). The findings validate the robustness of OWL2Vec* among other embedding algorithms in producing precise vector representations of ontology, and also demonstrate that our ontology has well-defined categorization aspects in conjunction of the embeddings.
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Paper Nr: 295
Title:

Sales Forecasting for Pricing Strategies Based on Time Series and Learning Techniques
Authors:

Jean-Christophe Ricklin, Ines Ben Amor, Raid Mansi, Vassilis Christophides and Hajer Baazaoui
Abstract: Time series exist in a wide variety of domains, such as market prices, healthcare and agriculture. Mod-elling time series data enables forecasting, anomaly detection, and data exploration. Few studies compare technologies and methodologies in the context of time series analysis, and existing tools are often limited in functionality. This paper focuses on the formulation and refinement of pricing strategies in mass retail, based on learning methods for sales forecasting and evaluation. The aim is to support BOOPER, a French startup specializing in pricing solutions for the retail sector. We focus on the strategy where each model is refined for a single product, studying both ensemble and parametric techniques as well as deep learning. To use these methods a hyperparameter setting is needed. The aim of this study is to provide an overview of the sensitivity of product sales to price fluctuations and promotions. The aim is also, to adapt existing methods using optimized machine and deep learning models, such as the Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) and the Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN), to capture the behaviour of each product. The idea is to improve their performance and adapt them to the specific requirements. We therefore provide an overview and experimental study of product learning models for each dataset, enabling informed decisions to be made about the most appropriate model and tool for each case.
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Paper Nr: 296
Title:

Deep Learning Model to Predict the Ripeness of Oil Palm Fruit
Authors:

Isis Bonet, Mario Gongora, Fernando Acevedo and Ivan Ochoa
Abstract: This study explores the application of deep learning, specifically the YOLOv8 model, for predicting the ripeness of oil palm fruit bunch through digital images. Recognizing the economic importance of oil palm cultivation, precise maturity assessment is crucial for optimizing harvesting decisions and overall productivity. Traditional methods relying on visual inspections and manual sampling are labor-intensive and subjective. Leveraging deep learning techniques, the study aims to automate maturity classification, addressing limitations of prior methodologies. The YOLOv8 model exhibits promising metrics, achieving high precision and recall values. Practical applications include deployment in production areas and real-time field scenarios, enhancing overall production processes. Despite excellent metric results, the model shows potential for further improvement with additional training data. The research highlights the effectiveness of YOLOv8 in automating the ripeness classification oil palm fruit bunches, contributing to sustainable cultivation practices in diverse agricultural settings.
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Paper Nr: 297
Title:

Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Collaborative Task Scheduling
Authors:

Mali I. Gergely
Abstract: Efficient, scalable and cost-efficient resource management is a multi-faceted online decision making problem, faced more and more in networking and cloud computing. More specifically, task-scheduling stands out as a complex challenge, solving which is critical for the optimal functioning of today’s systems. Traditional heuristic approaches to scheduling are laborious to design and especially difficult to tune, therefore various machine-learning based methods have been proposed. Reinforcement Learning (RL) showed great results in similar decision making problems, and many existing approaches employ RL to solve task scheduling problems. Most of these works consider either single-agent scenarios (and thus suffer from scalability issues), or the existing multi-agent applications are heavily specialised. We propose a general-purpose multi-agent RL framework that can successfully learn collaborative optimal scheduling policies, making one step further towards clouds and networks that are both scalable and autonomous. Our experiments show that these agents can collaboratively learn optimal scheduling policies for dynamic workloads.
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Paper Nr: 299
Title:

Predicting Children's Myopia Risk: A Monte Carlo Approach to Compare the Performance of Machine Learning Models
Authors:

Piotr Artiemjew, Radosław Cybulski, Mohammad Hassan Emamian, Andrzej Grzybowski, Andrzej Jankowski, Carla Lanca, Shiva Mehravaran, Marcin Młyński, Cezary Morawski, Klaus Nordhausen, Olavi Pärssinen and Krzysztof Ropiak
Abstract: This study presents the initial results of the Myopia Risk Calculator (MRC) Consortium, introducing an innovative approach to predict myopia risk by using trustworthy machine-learning models. The dataset included approximately 7,945 records (eyes) from 3,989 children. We developed a myopia risk calculator and an accompanying web interface. Central to our research is the challenge of model trustworthiness, specifically evaluating the effectiveness and robustness of AI (Artificial Intelligence)/ML (Machine Learning)/NLP (Natural Language Processing) models. We adopted a robust methodology combining Monte Carlo simulations with cross-validation techniques to assess model performance. Our experiments revealed that an ensemble of classifiers and regression models with Lasso regression techniques provided the best outcomes for predicting myopia risk. Future research aims to enhance model accuracy by integrating image and synthetic data, including advanced Monte Carlo simulations.
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Paper Nr: 301
Title:

BornFS: Feature Selection with Balanced Relevance and Nuisance and Its Application to Very Large Datasets
Authors:

Kilho Shin, Chris Liu, Katsuyuki Maeda and Hiroaki Ohshima
Abstract: In feature selection, we grapple with two primary challenges: devising effective evaluative indices for selected feature subsets and crafting scalable algorithms rooted in these indices. Our study addresses both. Beyond assessing the size and class relevance of selected features, we introduce a groundbreaking index, nuisance. It captures class-uncorrelated information, which can muddy subsequent processes. Our experiments confirm that a harmonious balance between class relevance and nuisance augments classification accuracy. To this end, we present the Balance-Optimized Relevance and Nuisance Feature Selection (BornFS) algorithm. It not only exhibits scalability to handle large datasets but also outperforms traditional methods by achieving better balance among the introduced indices. Notably, when applied to a dataset of 800,000 Windows executables, using LCC as a preprocessing filter, BornFS slashes the feature count from 10 million to under 200, maintaining a high accuracy in malware detection. Our findings shine a light on feature selection’s complexities and pave the way forward.
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Paper Nr: 305
Title:

Parking Scheduling Optimisation at Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport
Authors:

Thibault Falque, Christophe Lecoutre, Bertrand Mazure and Romain Wallon
Abstract: Before the COVID-19 health crisis, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) forecasted that air passengers would almost double by 2036, reaching 7.8 billion people. More than ever, air transport players such as airline and airport companies, in a strongly competitive climate, need to benefit from a carefully optimized management of the airport resources in order to improve the quality of services and to control the induced costs. For example, the allocation of parking spaces for landing aircrafts remains a central issue at the airports, while optimizing an economic function determined by some business rules. In this paper, we investigate the Airport Parking Assignment Problem (APAP) with a Constraint Programming (CP) approach. We introduce a CP model, under the form of a Constraint Optimization Problem, and present some promising preliminary experimental results from data coming from ADP (Aeroports de Paris).
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Paper Nr: 310
Title:

Introducing Reduced-Width QNNs, an AI-Inspired Ansatz Design Pattern
Authors:

Jonas Stein, Tobias Rohe, Francesco Nappi, Julian Hager, David Bucher, Maximilian Zorn, Michael Kölle and Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Abstract: Variational Quantum Algorithms are one of the most promising candidates to yield the first industrially relevant quantum advantage. Being capable of arbitrary function approximation, they are often referred to as Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) when being used in analog settings as classical Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Similar to the early stages of classical machine learning, known schemes for efficient architectures of these networks are scarce. Exploring beyond existing design patterns, we propose a reduced-width circuit ansatz design, which is motivated by recent results gained in the analysis of dropout regularization in QNNs. More precisely, this exploits the insight, that the gates of overparameterized QNNs can be pruned substantially until their expressibility decreases. The results of our case study show, that the proposed design pattern can significantly reduce training time while maintaining the same result quality as the standard "full-width" design in the presence of noise. We thus argue, that quantum architecture search should not blindly follow the classical overparameterization trend.
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Paper Nr: 312
Title:

Academia and Industry Synergy: Addressing Integrity Challenge in Programming Education
Authors:

Rina Azoulay, Tirza Hirst and Shulamit Reches
Abstract: This research addresses the profound challenges presented by sophisticated large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, especially in the context of educational settings, focusing on computer science and programming instruction. State of the art LLMs are capable of generating solutions for standard exercises that are assigned to students to bolster their analytical and programming skills. However, the ease of using AI to generate programming solutions poses a risk to the educational process and skill development, as it may lead students to depend on these solutions instead of engaging in their own problem-solving efforts. Our study suggests collaborative methods involving computer science educators and AI developers to provide evaluators with tools to distinguish between code produced by ChatGPT and code genuinely created by students. We propose a novel steganography-based technique for watermarking AI-generated code. By implementing this comprehensive strategy and effectively utilizing such technology through the combined efforts of educators, course administrators, and partnerships with AI developers, we believe it is possible to preserve the integrity of programming education in an age increasingly influenced by LLMs capable of generating code.
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Paper Nr: 314
Title:

Government's Response to Ethical Dilemmas in Autonomous Vehicle Accidents: An Australian Policy Evaluation
Authors:

Amir Rafiee, Hugh Breakey, Yong Wu and Abdul Sattar
Abstract: As Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) rapidly progress and become widely deployed, governments worldwide grapple with addressing the ethical challenges associated with AVs in dilemma situations that result in loss of human life. They are tackling these issues through the formulation of policies and guidelines, the establish-ment of dedicated research centres exploring the ethical implications of AVs, and seeking public opinions on how self-driving cars should handle such moral dilemmas. In this paper, we will evaluate the Australian government’s strategies for addressing the ethical issues related to AV accidents. We will critique the Decision Regulation Impact Statement (DRIS) released by the National Transport Commission (NTC) in 2018, which assessed the safety assurance options for Automated Driving Systems (ADSs). We will critically examine the NTC’s decision to exclude ethical considerations for AVs from the DRIS and the Automated Driving System Entity’s (ADSE) Statement of Compliance. We will contend that safety and ethics are intrinsically linked. Furthermore, we argue that relying solely on the safety criteria may prove inadequate when addressing ethical dilemmas. Consequently, we advocate for the inclusion of AV ethical considerations, especially in complex ethical dilemmas, in future dialogues, even if a clear consensus on ethical decision-making by ADSs remains elusive. In conclusion, we will propose recommendations for the Australian government to enhance the development, deployment, and acceptance of AV technology.
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Paper Nr: 316
Title:

Machine Learning for Predicting Traffic and Determining Road Capacity
Authors:

Alex Lewis, Rina Azoulay and Esther David
Abstract: This study proposes the use of machine learning techniques to predict traffic speed based on traffic flow and other road-related features, utilizing the California Freeway PeMS traffic dataset. Extensive research has been dedicated to the prediction of road speed; however, the primary challenge lies in accurately forecasting speed as a function of traffic flow. The learning methods compared include linear regression, K-nearest neighbors (KNN), decision trees, neural networks, and ensemble methods. The primary objective of this research is to develop a model capable of estimating road capacity, a crucial factor in designing an auction system for road usage. The findings reveal that the performance of each algorithm varies with the selection of features and the volume of data available. The results demonstrate that ensemble methods and KNN surpass other models in accuracy and consistency for predicting traffic speed. These models are then employed to create a flow-speed graph, which aids in determining road capacity.
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Paper Nr: 318
Title:

Enhancing Constraint Optimization Problems with Greedy Search and Clustering: A Focus on the Traveling Salesman Problem
Authors:

Sven Löffler, Ilja Becker and Petra Hofstedt
Abstract: Constraint optimization problems offer a means to obtain at a global solution for a given problem. At the same time the promise of finding a global solution, often this comes at the cost of significant time and computational resources. Greedy search and cluster identification methods represent two alternative approaches, which can lead fast to local optima. In this paper, we explore the advantages of incorporating greedy search and clustering techniques into constraint optimization methods without forsaking the pursuit of a global solution. The global search process is designed to consider clusters and initially behave akin to a greedy search. This dual strategy aims to achieve two key objectives: firstly, it accelerates the attainment of an initial solution, and secondly, it ensures that this solution possesses a high level of optimality. This guarantee is generally elusive for constraint optimization problems, where solvers may struggle to find a solution, or find one of adequate quality in acaptable time. Our approach is an improvement of the general Bunch-and-Bound approach in constraint programming. Finally, we validate our findings using the Traveling Salesman Problem as a case study.
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Paper Nr: 323
Title:

FAQ-Based Question Answering Systems with Query-Question and Query-Answer Similarity
Authors:

Vijay Kumari, Miloni Mittal, Yashvardhan Sharma and Lavika Goel
Abstract: A Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) Answering System maximizes knowledge access by enabling users to request a natural language question using the FAQ database. Retrieving FAQs is challenging due to the linguistic difference between a query and a question-answer pair. This work explores methods to improve on this linguistic gap in FAQ retrieval of the Question Answering System. The task is to retrieve frequently asked question-answer pairs (FAQ pairs) from the database that are related to the user’s query, thus providing answers to the user. We do so by leveraging natural language processing models like BERT and SBERT and ranking functions like BM25. The best results are obtained when BERT is trained in a triplet fashion (question, paraphrase, non-matching question) and combined with the BM25 model, which compares query with FAQ question answer concatenation.
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Paper Nr: 326
Title:

A Logic-Based Model to Reduce IoT Security Risks
Authors:

Luiz B. Lento, Pedro Patinho and Salvador Abreu
Abstract: As the world becomes more and more dynamic and competitive, people live more and more connected, breathing a cybernetic reality in their lives. IoT systems also do not escape this reality, they are omnipresent, providing a wide range of services to their users, and increasing their quality of life, enabled by IoT devices. In parallel with this technology, information security problems are also part of this IoT evolution. A key issue with IoT environments is ensuring security across all services and devices. The diversity of threats, together with the lack of concern of most of its administrators and device designers, make the IoT network environment vulnerable. This article presents RTRMM, a logic-based security risk management model that can help protect IoT environments, with new strategies to detect, analyze and assess risks, making it possible to predict risks and aiming to manage them in real time, thereby improving the reliability and safety of the IoT environment. It makes use of a combination of probability, fuzzy logic, Markov Chains, Games Theory, and Logic Programming to specify, test and validate its functionalities.
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Paper Nr: 332
Title:

Reward Design for Deep Reinforcement Learning Towards Imparting Commonsense Knowledge in Text-Based Scenario
Authors:

Ryota Kubo, Fumito Uwano and Manabu Ohta
Abstract: In text-based reinforcement learning, an agent learns from text to make appropriate choices, with a focus on addressing challenges associated with imparting commonsense knowledge to the learning agent. The commonsense knowledge requires the agent to understand not only the context but also the meaning of textual data. However, the methodology has not been established, that is, the effects on the agents, state-action space, reward, and environment that constitute reinforcement learning are not revealed. This paper focused on the reward for the commonsense knowledge to propose a new reward design method on the existing learning framework called ScriptWorld. The experimental results let us discuss the influence of the reward on the acquisition of commonsense knowledge by reinforcement learning.
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Paper Nr: 333
Title:

Is Noise Reduction Improving Open-Source ASR Transcription Engines Quality?
Authors:

Asma Trabelsi, Laurent Werey, Sébastien Warichet and Emmanuel Helbert
Abstract: Transcription has becoming an important task on the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Much research has focused on such a field so that we find a lot of paid and open-source ASR solutions. The choose of the best solution is crucial. Open source ones seems to be appropriate especially for companies that would maintain the aspect of data sovereignty. Vosk and Whisper are ASR open-source tools that have been revolutionized this last period. The first idea of this paper is to compare these two solutions in term of Word Error Rate (WER) to conclude who performs best. In the meantime, a lot of models aroused focusing on removing disturbing noises (such as dog barks, child screams, etc) during remote communication. The second idea of the paper is to study the influence of such models applied prior to the transcription service on the quality of the communication transcription. In our study, we focused on voice mail transcription use case.
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Paper Nr: 334
Title:

A Deep Analysis for Medical Emergency Missing Value Imputation
Authors:

Md F. Kabir and Sven Tomforde
Abstract: The prevalence of missing data is a pervasive issue in the medical domain, necessitating the frequent deployment of various imputation techniques. Within the realm of emergency medical care, multiple challenges have been addressed, and solutions have been explored. Notably, the development of an AI assistant for telenotary service (TNA) encounters a significantly higher frequency of missing values compared to other medical applications, with these values missing completely at random. In response to this, we compare several traditional machine learning algorithms with denoising autoencoder and denoising LSTM autoencoder strategies for imputing numerical (continuous) missing values. Our study employs a genuine medical emergency dataset, which is not publicly accessible. This dataset exhibits a significant class imbalance and includes numerous outliers representing rare occurrences. Our findings indicate that the denoising LSTM autoencoder outperforms the conventional approach.
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Paper Nr: 340
Title:

Rule-Based Decision Making in Biologically Inspired Condition Management System
Authors:

Hariom Dhungana
Abstract: Biomimicry is an approach for solving industrial challenges by taking inspiration from bio-organisms’ responses. In an ongoing research project, investigations are being carried out to explore the use of biomimicry approach for a human-centric condition management system. In this system the decision-making process is divided into three types procedural decision-making, deliberative decision-making, and argumentative decision-making. This paper intends to show the experimental verification of rule-based decision making (a type of procedural decision making) in condition monitoring system using an example of rolling element bearing. Rule-based decision-making involves using predefined guidelines to make choices, ensuring structured, consistent, fair, efficient, and unbiased decisions. Vibration sensor data is used from PRONOSTIA datasets to obtain four useful information’s and using those information’s in fuzzy rules to get decision. The outcomes indicate the viability of the suggested framework for rule-based decision-making using real-time vibration data.
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Paper Nr: 343
Title:

Advancements and Challenges in Continual Learning for Natural Language Processing: Insights and Future Prospects
Authors:

Asma Kharrat, Fadoua Drira, Franck Lebourgeois and Bertrand Kerautret
Abstract: Deep learning-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) has advanced significantly over the past decades, in light of static learning’s remarkable performance across a range of text datasets. However, this method heavily relies on static surroundings and predefined datasets, making it difficult to manage ongoing data streams without losing track of previously acquired knowledge. Continual learning provides a more effective and adaptable framework. It tries to make it possible for machine learning models to learn from an ongoing data stream while maintaining their prior knowledge. In the context of NLP, continual learning presents unique challenges and opportunities due to its dynamic and diversity. In this paper, We shall provide a thorough analysis of CL’s most recent advancements in the NLP disciplines in which major challenges are illustrated. We also critically review the existing CL evaluation solutions and benchmarks in NLP. Finally, we present open issues that we consider need further investigations and our outlook on future research directions.
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Paper Nr: 353
Title:

Time Series Prediction Models in Healthcare: Systematic Literature Review
Authors:

Zina Zammel, Nesrine Khabou, Lotfi Souifi and Ismael Bouassida Rodriguez
Abstract: Technology has solved many of humanity’s complex problems. Furthermore, healthcare providers and researchers are working together to achieve precision medicine, which is the goal of tailoring medical treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient. As a result, patients will receive better care. In this context, healthcare benefits from Time Series Prediction (TSP) models to improve service levels. TSP models have been successfully used to predict a variety of outcomes, such as patient readmission rates, disease progression, and treatment effectiveness. This study presents a systematic literature review (SLR) focusing on TSP models in healthcare. Based on a systematic search of IEEE, Science Direct, Springer, Hyper Articles en Ligne (HAL), and ACM, 50 articles published between 2018 and 2023 were identified. A review of predictive use cases in healthcare and the TSP models used for them has been conducted in this paper. We classified these models into four categories such as statistical models, Deep Learning (DL) models, Machine Learning (ML) models and Hybrid models.
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Paper Nr: 357
Title:

3D Face Data Augmentation Based on Gravitational Shape Morphing for Intra-Class Richness
Authors:

Emna Ghorbel and Faouzi Ghorbel
Abstract: This paper introduces the 3D Face Gravitational Morphing to elevate the performance of Deep Learning models in the realm of 3D facial classification. Addressing the constraints imposed by small-scale datasets, our approach amplifies intra-class variability while maintaining the semantic fidelity of 3D models. This is accomplished by generating shapes within the proximity of the original models in the context of shape space, facilitated by a curvature-based correspondence. The integration of Face Gravitational Morphing into the architecture is demonstrated through its application to the BU3DFE dataset for classification purposes. A comparative analysis reveals the method’s relative performance, representing an initial step towards mitigating limitations in facial classification. Ongoing investigations are underway to refine and extend these promising results.
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Paper Nr: 370
Title:

Prediction of Kellgren-Lawrence Grade of Knee Osteoarthritis by Deep Residual Networks Using MR Image with Segmented Image and Slice Position
Authors:

Daniele Manfredonia, Seiichi Harata, Takuto Sakuma, Francesco Trovò and Shohei Kato
Abstract: This research explores the application of deep learning techniques, specifically employing a residual neural network, to predict Kellgren-Lawrence grade (KLG) in osteoarthritis patients using magnetic resonance images (MRI). Taking advantage of the characteristics of images, the proposed model integrates the MRI slice number and the use of segmented images. Unlike conventional approaches, we adopt a one-to-one image processing strategy, so our model takes each slice individually as input and returns a prediction for each of them to enhance the model’s ability to focus on specific slices and increase the results’ interpretability. Furthermore, results on real-world data corroborate the idea that the segmented image can provide more accurate prediction by allowing our network to focus on the crucial parts of the knee. The empirical results show the model’s promising performance in predicting KLG, demonstrating its potential for accurate and detailed diagnosis of osteoarthritis. This research contributes to advancing studies on the early prediction of osteoarthritis by proposing an effective and interpretable deep-learning framework for osteoarthritis assessment.
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Paper Nr: 377
Title:

A Supervised Learning Approach to Robust Reinforcement Learning for Job Shop Scheduling
Authors:

Christoph Schmidl, Thiago D. Simão and Nils Jansen
Abstract: The job shop scheduling problem (JSSP) is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem with the objective of minimizing the makespan while adhering to domain-specific constraints. Recent developments cast JSSP as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem, diverging from classical methods like heuristics or constraint programming. However, RL policies, serving as schedulers, often lack permutation invariance for job orderings in JSSP, limiting their generalization capabilities. In this paper, we improve the generalization of RL in the JSSP using a three-step approach that combines RL and supervised learning. Furthermore, we investigate permutation invariance and generalization to unseen JSSP instances. Initially, RL policies are trained on Taillard instances for 1800 seconds using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). These policies generate data sets of state-action pairs, augmented with varying permutation percentages to transpose job orders. The final step uses the generated data sets for retraining in a supervised learning setup, focusing on permutation invariance and dropout layers to improve robustness. Our approach (1) improves robustness regarding unseen instances by reducing the mean makespan and standard deviation after outlier removal by -0.43% and -15.31%, respectively, and (2) demonstrates the effect of job order permutations in supervised learning regarding the mean makespan and standard deviation.
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Paper Nr: 378
Title:

VOEDHgesture: A Multi-Purpose Visual Odometry/ Simultaneous Localization and Mapping and Egocentric Dynamic Hand Gesture Data-Set for Virtual Object Manipulations in Wearable Mixed Reality
Authors:

Yemineni Ashok, Mukesh K. Rohil, Kshitij Tandon and Harshil Sethi
Abstract: Visual Odometry/ Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (VO/ SLAM) and Egocentric hand gesture recognition are the two major technologies for wearable computing devices like AR (Augmented Reality)/ MR (Mixed Reality) glasses. However, the AR/MR community lacks a suitable dataset for developing both hand gesture recognition and RGB-D SLAM methods. In this work, we use a ZED mini Camera to develop challenging benchmarks for RGB-D VO/ SLAM tasks and dynamic hand gesture recognition. In our dataset VOEDHgesture, we collected 264 sequences using a ZED mini camera, along with precisely measured and time-synchronized ground truth camera positions, and manually annotated the bounding box values for the hand region of interest. The sequences comprise both RGB and depth images, captured at HD resolution (1920 × 1080) and recorded at a video frame rate of 30Hz. To resemble the Augmented Reality environment, the sequences are captured using a head-mounted ZED mini camera, with unrestricted 6-DOF (degree of freedom) movements in different varieties of scenes and camera motions, i.e. indoor, outdoor, slow motion, quick motions, long trajectories, loop closures etc. This dataset can help researchers to develop and promote reproducible research in the fields of egocentric hand tracking, visual odometry/SLAM and computer vision algorithms for AR scene reconstruction and scene understanding, etc.
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Paper Nr: 379
Title:

iXGB: Improving the Interpretability of XGBoost Using Decision Rules and Counterfactuals
Authors:

Mir Riyanul Islam, Mobyen Uddin Ahmed and Shahina Begum
Abstract: Tree-ensemble models, such as Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), are renowned Machine Learning models which have higher prediction accuracy compared to traditional tree-based models. This higher accuracy, however, comes at the cost of reduced interpretability. Also, the decision path or prediction rule of XGBoost is not explicit like the tree-based models. This paper proposes the iXGB–interpretable XGBoost, an approach to improve the interpretability of XGBoost. iXGB approximates a set of rules from the internal structure of XGBoost and the characteristics of the data. In addition, iXGB generates a set of counterfactuals from the neighbourhood of the test instances to support the understanding of the end-users on their operational relevance. The performance of iXGB in generating rule sets is evaluated with experiments on real and benchmark datasets, which demonstrated reasonable interpretability. The evaluation result also supports the idea that the interpretability of XGBoost can be improved without using surrogate methods.
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Paper Nr: 383
Title:

Bridging the Explanation Gap in AI Security: A Task-Driven Approach to XAI Methods Evaluation
Authors:

Ondrej Lukas and Sebastian Garcia
Abstract: Deciding which XAI technique is best depends not only on the domain, but also on the given task, the dataset used, the model being explained, and the target goal of that model. We argue that the evaluation of XAI methods has not been thoroughly analyzed in the network security domain, which presents a unique type of challenge. While there are XAI methods applied in network security there is still a large gap between the needs of security stakeholders and the selection of the optimal method. We propose to approach the problem by first defining the stack-holders in security and their prototypical tasks. Each task defines inputs and specific needs for explanations. Based on these explanation needs (e.g. understanding the performance, or stealing a model), we created five XAI evaluation techniques that are used to compare and select which XAI method is best for each task (dataset, model, and goal). Our proposed approach was evaluated by running experiments for different security stakeholders, machine learning models, and XAI methods. Results were compared with the AutoXAI technique and random selection. Results show that our proposal to evaluate and select XAI methods for network security is well-grounded and that it can help AI security practitioners find better explanations for their given tasks.
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Paper Nr: 24
Title:

Artificial Intelligence for Visualization, Processing and Predict of Temperature and Fluid Flow Modeling
Authors:

Vishal Nandigana
Abstract: In this paper we propose python code written anaconda terminal run Windows OS usage for visualization and processing of big data having 4 million data points of size 36.2 MB file vector x ⃗ of 4𝑚 𝑏𝑦 4𝑚 𝑏𝑦 4𝑚 uniform meshed 100 points and solver opensource software OpenFOAM to calculate temperature profile of steel whose thermal diffusivity is 14.76 × 10−6 𝑚2/𝑠 by Laplacian partial differential equations. The software in use in AISoft visualization and processing commercial software (Sidharth and Vishal, 2022). Here we also use data driven model for predict match experiments of turbulent flow and low temperature measurements on copper core arrangements and silicon, respectively. The software in use is AISoft Windows 800 commercial software (Luke, Vishal and Jay, 2021). To compile the model train_number.csv vector measurements are uploaded in the software. The model uses RNN-LSTM method and Adam optimization minimization to calculate the learning parameters. We predict the new locations and states vector measurements. The model shows 3-order speed up in computational time compared to unclear traditional turbulence models and conduction additions to the model. Also the predicted solution shows 98% accuracy. Artificial Intelligence for big data, visualization, processing, predict models is in use for AI Agents, AI ethics, cinemas, art, electronics, calendar planner and engineering applications.
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Paper Nr: 34
Title:

Improvement of Satellite Image Classification Using Attention-Based Vision Transformer
Authors:

Nawel Slimani, Imen Jdey and Monji Kherallah
Abstract: This study introduces a transformative approach to satellite image classification using the Vision Transformer (ViT) model, a revolutionary deep learning method. Unlike conventional methods, ViT divides images into patches and employs self-attention mechanisms to capture intricate spatial dependencies, enabling the discernment of nuanced patterns at the patch level. This key innovation results in remarkable classification accuracy, surpassing 98% for SAT4 and SAT6 datasets. The study’s findings hold substantial promise for diverse applications, including urban planning, agriculture, disaster response, and environmental conservation. By providing a nuanced understanding of ViT’s impact on satellite imagery analysis, this work not only contributes insights into ViT’s architecture and training process but also establishes a robust foundation for advancing the field and promoting sustainable resource management through informed decision-making.
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Paper Nr: 40
Title:

Models with Verbally Enunciated Explanations: Towards Safe, Accountable, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence
Authors:

Mattias Wahde
Abstract: In this position paper, we propose a new approach to artificial intelligence (AI), involving systems, abbreviated MOVEEs, that are capable of generating a verbally enunciated explanation of their actions, such that the explanation is also correct by construction. The possibility of obtaining a human-understandable, verbal explanation of any action or decision taken by an AI system is highly desirable, and is becoming increasingly important at this time when many AI systems operate as inscrutable black boxes. We describe the desirable properties of the proposed systems, contrasting them with existing AI approaches. We also discuss limitations and possible applications. While the discussion is mostly held in general terms, we also provide a specific example of a completed system, as well as a few examples of ongoing and future work.
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Paper Nr: 42
Title:

Predicting Emotion Before an Utterance: Replacing Contextual Information with Knowledge-Based Prediction
Authors:

Takumi Fujimoto and Takayuki Ito
Abstract: As textual conversation becomes more mainstream, emotional understanding that contributes to collective intelligence and team performance plays an essential role. However, most studies of emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) have focused on analyzing emotion after a participant speaks, and few have addressed predicting emotion in ongoing conversations before an utterance is made. In this paper, we tackle predicting emotion before a speaker expresses their emotion and propose utilizing knowledge-based prediction as an appropriate replacement for contextual information. We develop a context model to capture conversations and replace future conversational data that cannot be exploited in actual predictions with appropriate knowledge-based predictions. Our model outperformed existing models in predicting conversational emotions on a dataset composed of conversations between multiple participants.
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Paper Nr: 43
Title:

Significance of Training Images and Feature Extraction in Lesion Classification
Authors:

Adél Bajcsi, Anca Andreica and Camelia Chira
Abstract: Proper treatment of breast cancer is essential to increase survival rates. Mammography is a widely used, noninvasive screening method for breast cancer. A challenging task in mammogram analysis is to distinguish between tumors. In the current study, we address this problem using different feature extraction and classification methods. In the literature, numerous feature extraction methods have been presented for breast lesion classification, such as textural features, shape features, and wavelet features. In the current paper, we propose the use of shape features. In general, benign lesions have a more regular shape than malignant lesions. However, there are exceptions and in our experiments, we highlight the importance of a balanced split of these samples. Decision Tree and Random Forest methods are used for classification due to their simplicity and interpretability. A comparative analysis is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the classification methods. The best results were achieved using the Random Forest classifier with 96.12% accuracy using images from the Digital Dataset for Screening Mammography – DDSM.
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Paper Nr: 53
Title:

Zero Trust for Intrusion Detection System: A Systematic Literature Review
Authors:

Abeer Z. Alalmaie, Nazar Waheed, Mohrah Alalyan, Priyadarsi Nanda, Wenjing Jia and Xiangjian He
Abstract: Organizations today are facing increasing cybersecurity challenges by moving more services to the cloud and outsourcing Intrusion Detection System (IDS) network monitoring tasks to third-party analysts. Zero Trust models may mitigate these challenges by employing the philosophy of “Never Trust, Always Verify.” However, specific anonymization approaches are required to ensure information integrity while preserving privacy. This paper reviews the existing approaches identified in the literature, compares them, and assesses the privacy-accuracy trade-offs. Plus, we have discussed future research directions and knowledge gaps.
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Paper Nr: 65
Title:

Uncertain Formal Concept Analysis for the Study of a Text Corpus
Authors:

Guillaume Petiot
Abstract: The analysis of a corpus by an expert takes a relatively long time. The development of digital tools made it possible to generate instantly a summary of information contained in the corpus. In this paper, we will focus on the contribution of formal concept analysis (FCA) to the analysis of a corpus. FCA makes it possible to build a model also called the Hasse diagram which can be queried to find relevant formal concepts. Uncertainties can be present in all steps of the processing from the corpus processing to the visualization of the results. Indeed, if the words of the corpus are misspelled or additional quantitative variables are associated with the corpus, then uncertainties can appear. Uncertainties may also arise in queries when human knowledge is imprecise. Possibility theory allows us to represent and process these imperfections. The combination of textual analysis solutions and FCA allow us to present more relevant results that take into consideration uncertainties.
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Paper Nr: 67
Title:

Real-Time Deep Learning-Based Malware Detection Using Static and Dynamic Features
Authors:

Radu Ş. Mihalache, Dragoș T. Gavriluț and Dan G. Anton
Abstract: Cyber-security industry has been the home of various machine learning approaches meant to be more proactive when it comes to new threats. In time, as security solutions matured, so did the way in which artificial intelligence algorithms are being used for specific contexts. In particular, static and dynamic analysis of a threat determines certain characteristics of an artificial intelligence algorithm (such as inference speed, memory usage) used for threat detection. While from a product point of view, static and dynamic analysis of a threat target separate product features such as protection for static analysis and detection for dynamic analysis, the feature sets derived from analyzing threats in those two scenarios (static and dynamic analysis) are complementary and could improve the accuracy of a model if used together. The current paper focuses on a multi-layered approach that takes into consideration both static and dynamic analysis of a threat.
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Paper Nr: 70
Title:

A Multi-Stage Approach to Image Consistency in Zero-Shot Character Art Generation for the D&D Domain
Authors:

Gayashan Weerasundara and Nisansa de Silva
Abstract: In the evolving landscape of computer graphics, the pursuit of consistency in image generation remains a compelling challenge. This paper delineates a comprehensive methodology that harnesses the capabilities of the Stable Diffusion (SD) model, an adept open-source image generation tool, to generate consistent and high-fidelity imagery. Beginning with the training of a generalized art style for the popular tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, our research journeyed through specific character generation and the creation of exhaustive character sheets, culminating in the generation of consistent character images across various poses.
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Paper Nr: 74
Title:

Simulation of Consumers Behavior Facing Discounts and Promotions
Authors:

Jarod Vanderlynden, Philippe Mathieu and Romain Warlop
Abstract: Discounts in stores are a powerful tools companies can use to create brand loyalty for products or increase sales during a short period of time. However, discounts are costly campaigns that result in complex effects on consumers, yielding unpredictable results and returns on investment. To maintain competitiveness, stores and brands have to use those campaigns and risk substantial investments. To gain a better understanding of the impact of discounts on consumer behavior, we argue that it is necessary to complement aggregated solutions with more granular, individually-centered approaches, such as agent-based modeling. In our study, we propose a new model based on social and psychological findings capable of replicating important and well-known emergent phenomena. This simulation model permits the study of behavioral responses to discounts and price strategy and can help companies to gain a clearer understanding of the effects of their different campaigns.
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Paper Nr: 75
Title:

Efficient Batch Assignment for Parallel-Machine Production Scheduling
Authors:

Christoph Fünfzig, Roderich Wallrath and Stefan Hubert
Abstract: In this article, we consider different batch assignment schemes for non-separable, non-preemptive production scheduling on m parallel work stations. Batch assignment is a very important part of production models as batches with identical parameters usually occur in a large number in real-world applications, which causes a large number of symmetric solutions. The common scheme Exactly-n for assignment of n batches to m machines originating from general assignment problems is very inefficient when it comes to scheduling, even with additional ordering for symmetry breaking (Exactly-n Ordered). We define three restricted assignment schemes for the same-parameter batches by forming blocks of size 0 ≤ zi ≤ n on machine i and ordering them between the different machines. We compute bounds for the number of feasible assignments as a measure for the feasible space and give solving times from our experiments with a boolean inference-based solver like the Google CP-SAT solver. We show that with the proposed restricted assignment schemes, production scheduling models result that solve significantly faster than the models with the common scheme Exactly-n.
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Paper Nr: 81
Title:

SMOTE: Are We Learning to Classify or to Detect Synthetic Data?
Authors:

Nada Boudegzdame, Karima Sedki, Rosy Tspora and Jean-Baptiste Lamy
Abstract: Oversampling algorithms are used as preprocess in machine learning, in the case of highly imbalanced data in an attempt to balance the number of samples per class, and therefore improve the quality of models learned. While oversampling can be effective in improving the performance of classification models on minority classes, it can also introduce several problems. From our work, it came to light that the models learn to detect the noise added by the oversampling algorithms instead of the underlying patterns. In this article, we will define oversampling, and present the most common techniques, before proposing a method for evaluating oversampling algorithms.
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Paper Nr: 99
Title:

Artificial Intelligence Algorithms to Predict College Students’ Dropout: A Systematic Mapping Study
Authors:

Henrique S. Rodrigues, Eduardo S. Santiago, Gabriel X. Wanderley, Laura O. Moraes, Carlos E. Mello, Reinaldo V. Alvares and Rodrigo D. Santos
Abstract: Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), including universities, colleges, and faculties, must develop strategies to mitigate students’ dropout rates in undergraduate courses. This is crucial for fulfilling their social role, delivering high-quality professionals to society, contributing to economic development, and preventing the resource wastage. In this context, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms have emerged as powerful tools capable of predicting dropout rates and identifying undergraduates at risk. This study aims to investigate and discuss the state-of-the-art in applying AI algorithms to address students’ dropout. To achieve this objective, a systematic mapping study (SMS) was conducted, encompassing 223 studies at first. Finally, 23 studies were selected for in-depth analysis to explore the effectiveness of AI algorithms in predicting students’ dropout. Furthermore, we identified key methodological design issues associated with the application of these AI algorithms, including common features and challenges in implementing these methodologies. This study contributes by providing practitioners and researchers with an overview of the main challenges faced by AI algorithms in predicting students’ dropout, highlighting issues related to modeling, experimental methodology, and problem framing.
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Paper Nr: 119
Title:

DeepTraderX: Challenging Conventional Trading Strategies with Deep Learning in Multi-Threaded Market Simulations
Authors:

Armand M. Cismaru
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce DeepTraderX (DTX), a simple Deep Learning-based trader, and present results that demonstrate its performance in a multi-threaded market simulation. In a total of about 500 simulated market days, DTX has learned solely by watching the prices that other strategies produce. By doing this, it has successfully created a mapping from market data to quotes, either bid or ask orders, to place for an asset. Trained on historical Level-2 market data, i.e., the Limit Order Book (LOB) for specific tradable assets, DTX processes the market state S at each timestep T to determine a price P for market orders. The market data used in both training and testing was generated from unique market schedules based on real historic stock market data. DTX was tested extensively against the best strategies in the literature, with its results validated by statistical analysis. Our findings underscore DTX’s capability to rival, and in many instances, surpass, the performance of public-domain traders, including those that outclass human traders, emphasising the efficiency of simple models, as this is required to succeed in intricate multi-threaded simulations. This highlights the potential of leveraging ”black-box” Deep Learning systems to create more efficient financial markets.
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Paper Nr: 123
Title:

Prediction in Pre-University Education System Using Machine Learning Methods
Authors:

Ioan-Daniel Pop
Abstract: This paper aims to present the results obtained from the experiments of predicting the academic performance of students from the pre-university education system in Romania. The prediction of academic performance is an extremely important topic in the field of educational data mining, the creation of such a system bringing many benefits to the teaching-learning-evaluation process. The data set used in this paper is original and contains real data collected from 24 educational institutions in the Romanian rural and urban environment. The sample is composed of students who belong to all social categories and who had different academic performances. The results obtained for Random Forest and Artificial Neural Network were good, more precisely following the experiments performed, it resulted in an accuracy greater than 90%.
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Paper Nr: 125
Title:

LSA Is not Dead: Improving Results of Domain-Specific Information Retrieval System Using Stack Overflow Questions Tags
Authors:

Szymon Olewniczak, Julian Szymanski, Piotr Malak, Robert Komar and Agnieszka Letowska
Abstract: The paper presents the approach to using tags from Stack Overflow questions as a data source in the process of building domain-specific unsupervised term embeddings. Using a huge dataset of Stack Overflow posts, our solution employs the LSA algorithm to learn latent representations of information technology terms. The paper also presents the Teamy.ai system, currently developed by Scalac company, which serves as a platform that helps match IT project inquiries with potential candidates. The heart of the system is the information retrieval module that searches for the best-matching candidates according to the project requirements. In the paper, we used our pre-trained embeddings to enhance the search queries using the query expansion algorithm from the neural information retrieval domain. The proposed solution improves the precision of the retrieval compared to the basic variant without query expansion.
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Paper Nr: 131
Title:

Comparing Global and Local Weights in Multi-Criteria Decision-Making: A COMET-Based Approach
Authors:

Andrii Shekhovtsov and Wojciech Sałabun
Abstract: In the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) domain, decision-makers encounter the challenge of considering multiple criteria with varying importance. While numerous methods exist to determine global weights, less attention has been given to identifying local weights for individual alternatives. Unlike global weights, local weights indicate the relevance of individual criteria in the context of a specific alternative. Global weights assume a constant linear dependence of substitutability throughout the domain, where local weights indicate a local dependence, depending on the value of all attributes of a given alternative. This paper demonstrates the usage of Characteristic Objects METhod (COMET) to determine local criteria weights and provides simulation results to show the differences in those weights. By understanding the significance of criteria for specific alternatives and their impact on the overall evaluation, local weights contribute to a more comprehensive and reliable ranking. This paper presents the necessary methodologies, describes the pseudocode algorithm, and showcases two examples of two COMET models and a simulation that utilizes the ESP-COMET approach. The simulation results highlight generalized results showing the importance of identifying local weights.
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Paper Nr: 137
Title:

Social Implications of OCEAN Personality: An Automated BERT-Based Approach
Authors:

Chaitanya Chakka, Bathini S. Akash and Aruna Malapati
Abstract: The importance of personality within society is paramount, as it profoundly influences individual and collective behaviors, interpersonal interactions, and the overall functionality of societies. However, for a long time, personality detection from online social texts has been lacking in performance. This is due to the limited data availability and constrained supervised learning frameworks over small labeled datasets. In this work, we present a novel approach to personality prediction utilizing BERT in conjunction with two notable datasets, achieving proficient accuracy across the OCEAN traits. The research also extracts linguistic cues that do not require supervision. Finally, we perform extensive empirical analysis to conclude over four research questions that deal with the social implications of personality. The approach provides pragmatic results, making use of the designed automatic personality prediction pipeline. The code has also been made open source to facilitate enhanced innovation and research benefits (https://github.com/LearningLeopard/personality-prediction).
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Paper Nr: 142
Title:

Towards Developing an Agent-Based Framework for Validating the Trustworthiness of Large Language Models
Authors:

Johannes Bubeck, Janick Greinacher, Yannik Langer, Tobias Roth and Carsten Lanquillon
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of generative artificial intelligence and strongly affect human-computer interaction based on natural language. Yet, it is difficult for users to understand how trustful LLM outputs are. Therefore, this paper develops an agent-based framework by exploring approaches, methods, and the integration of external data sources. The framework contributes to AI reasearch and usage by enabling future users to consider LLM outputs more efficiently and critically.
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Paper Nr: 148
Title:

Partial Tensorized Transformers for Natural Language Processing
Authors:

Subhadra Vadlamannati and Ryan Solgi
Abstract: The transformer architecture has revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP) and other machine-learning tasks, due to its unprecedented accuracy. However, their extensive memory and parameter requirements often hinder their practical applications. In this work, we study the effect of tensor-train decomposition to improve the accuracy and compress transformer vision-language neural networks, namely BERT and ViT. We focus both on embedding-layer compression and partial tensorization of neural networks (PTNN) through an algorithmic approach. Our novel PTNN approach significantly improves the accuracy of existing models by up to 5%, all without the need for post-training adjustments, breaking new ground in the field of tensor decomposition.
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Paper Nr: 158
Title:

Agent Based Model for AUTODL Optimisation
Authors:

Aroua Hedhili and Imen Khelfa
Abstract: Auto Deep Learning (AUTODL) has witnessed remarkable growth and advancement in recent years, simplifying neural network model selection, hyperparameter tuning, and model evaluation, thereby increasing accessibility for users with limited deep learning expertise. Nevertheless, certain performance limitations persist, notably in the realm of computational resource utilization. In response, we introduce an agent-based AUTODL methodology that leverages multi-objective optimization principles and collective intelligence to create high-performing artificial neural networks. Our experimental results confirm the effectiveness of this approach across various criteria, including accuracy, computational inference time, and resource consumption.
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Paper Nr: 169
Title:

Wildlife Species Classification on the Edge: A Deep Learning Perspective
Authors:

Subodh Ingaleshwar, Farid Thasharofi, Mateo A. Pava, Harshit Vaishya, Yazan Tabak, Juergen Ernst, Ruben Portas, Wanja Rast, Joerg Melzheimer, Ortwin Aschenborn, Theresa Goetz and Stephan Goeb
Abstract: Accurate and timely recognition of wild animal species is very important for various management processes in nature conservation. In this article, we propose an energy-efficient way of classifying animal species in real-time. Specifically, we present an image classification system on a low power Edge-AI device, which embeds a deep neural network (DNN) in a microcontroller that accurately recognizes different animal species. We evaluate the performance of the proposed system using a real-world dataset collected via a small handheld camera from remote conservation regions of Africa. We implement different DNN models and deploy them on the embedded device to perform real-time classification of animal species. The experimental results show that the proposed animal species classification system is able to obtain a remarkable accuracy of 84.30% with an energy efficiency of 0.885 𝑚J on an edge device. This work provides a new perspective toward low power, energy-efficient, fast and accurate edge-AI technology to help in inhibiting wildlife-human conflicts.
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Paper Nr: 170
Title:

Proposal of a Cosmetic Product Recommendation Method with Review Text that is Predicted to Be Write by Users
Authors:

Natsumi Baba, Yuichi Sei, Yasuyuki Tahara and Akihiko Ohsuga
Abstract: There are a variety of product introduction sites on the Internet, and many of these usually provide a combination of product composition information and user review text. It is difficult to understand the features of a product in detail from the information on these sites. Furthermore, these review sites often include product recommendations such as "recommended for you," but often lack an explanation of why the product is recommended. Therefore, this study proposes an approach that provides both the user’s opinion of the product and the reason for recommending the product in a simplified manner. Using cosmetics as a case study, where the user’s actual experience is important, we scored product features on a 5-point scale based on review submitted by users. This data was used for collaborative filtering to determine product recommendations and generate review sentences that target users are expected to write when using the product. The generated reviews facilitate users to understand the details of a product before purchasing it and are useful for comparison before purchasing a product. To verify the usefulness of the proposed method, we conducted a questionnaire comparing it with existing methods. The proposed method aims to improve user satisfaction in product recommendations.
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Paper Nr: 172
Title:

Detecting and Analyzing Agent Communication Anomalies in Distributed Energy System Control
Authors:

Emilie Frost, Julia C. Heiken, Martin Tröschel and Astrid Nieße
Abstract: In Cyber-Physical Energy Systems (CPES), multi-agent systems are expected to perform a variety of tasks. The increase in digital interconnections and distributed structures in CPES leads to more cyber access points, which increases the risk of cyber attacks. The effect of a manipulated or corrupted agent, as caused by cyber attacks, on the communication of an agent system is investigated in this paper. Anomaly detection is an important prerequisite to identify and mitigate malicious behavior and thus protect the critical infrastructure of CPES. Since in distributed systems, some information is only available in a distributed way, this paper introduces a centralized and a distributed architecture for anomaly detection. For this, a dataset is presented from an agent-based energy system control use case, including anomalies in agent behavior.
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Paper Nr: 186
Title:

Enhancing Breast Cancer Diagnosis: Automated Segmentation and Detection with YOLOv8
Authors:

Farag H. Alhsnony and Lamia Sellami
Abstract: Breast cancer is a pervasive global health concern, demanding precise and timely diagnosis for effective treatment. In this research, we present an innovative approach to breast cancer segmentation using YOLOv8x-seg, a specialized variant of the YOLO (You Only Look Once) model optimized for semantic segmentation. The methodology commences with comprehensive data collection from the Curated Breast Imaging Subset of DDSM (CBIS-DDSM) dataset, which encompasses various breast conditions, and meticulous data annotation facilitated by Roboflow. The YOLOv8x-seg model is trained to achieve an F1-score of 95.27% and an IoU (Intersection over Union) of 89.51%. These metrics are indicative of the model’s ability to accurately identify and segment breast cancer anomalies within mammography images. The anticipated outcome is a model poised to significantly improve the efficiency and accuracy of breast cancer diagnosis, offering a valuable contribution to the field of medical image analysis.
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Paper Nr: 196
Title:

Automating Opinion Extraction from Semi-Structured Webpages: Leveraging Language Models and Instruction Finetuning on Synthetic Data
Authors:

Dawid A. Plaskowski, Szymon Skwarek, Dominika Grajewska, Maciej Niemir and Agnieszka Ławrynowicz
Abstract: To address the challenge of extracting opinions from semi-structured webpages such as blog posts and product rankings, encoder-decoder transformer models are employed. We enhance the models’ performance by generating synthetic data using large language models like GPT3.5 and GPT-4, diversified through prompts featuring various text styles, personas and product characteristics. Different fine-tuning strategies are experimented, training both with and without domain-adapted instructions, as well as, training on synthetic customer reviews, targeting tasks such as extracting product names, pros, cons, and opinion sentences. Our evaluation shows a significant improvement in the models’ performance in both product characteristic and opinion extraction tasks, validating the effectiveness of using synthetic data for fine-tuning and signals the potential of pretrained language models to automate web scraping techniques from diverse web sources.
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Paper Nr: 197
Title:

New Approach Based on Substantial Derivative and LSTM for Online Arabic Handwriting Script Recognition
Authors:

Hasanien T. Alothman, Wafa Lejmi and Mohamed A. Mahjoub
Abstract: As some tasks easily performed by man seem to be hard to be accomplished by the machine, the Artificial Intelligence field examines more and more the reproduction of thinking methods and human intuition by studying some mental faculties and substituting them by calculating approaches. Among the major fields of such interest, we can focus on recognizing handwritten characters. However, most handwritten characters are written in Latin, which makes the recognition of Arabic characters handwriting a delicate process compared to other languages, due to the specificity of Arabic words. In this paper, we aim to conceive a framework that offers the ability to recognize online Arabic handwriting applied to a dataset named ADAB (Arabic DAtaBase), using a particular descriptor based on a substantial derivative and a neural network handling Arabic handwritten characters features and then electing the appropriate output for the final decision.
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Paper Nr: 200
Title:

A Systematic Literature Review of Artificial Intelligence Applications for Diagnosing Hand Tremor Disorders Through Video Analysis
Authors:

Eduardo Furtado and Ana B. Garcia
Abstract: In neurodegenerative disorders, accurate diagnosis of hand tremors serves as a cornerstone for effective management and treatment plans. With the burgeoning advances in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, substantial promise exists for devising robust and reliable diagnostic methodologies. This paper presents a systematic literature review analyzing 17 key studies that have employed machine-learning techniques to diagnose hand tremors. The scrutiny is multidimensional, elucidating the primary research objectives, patient tasks during studies, distinct features utilized by the machine learning models, and various validation techniques applied. The aim is to offer a synthesized research landscape, identifying recurring methodologies and techniques. Moreover, we seek to underscore gaps and potential avenues for future investigations. Through this systematic examination, we endeavor to contribute to the scholarly discourse, aiding the focused and coherent advancement of machine learning-based diagnostic models within this critical healthcare domain.
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Paper Nr: 203
Title:

Analysis of Intraday Financial Market Using ML and Neural Networks for GBP/USD Currency Pair Price Forecasting
Authors:

Melis Zhalalov and Vitaliy Milke
Abstract: This study employs a range of machine learning and artificial neural network techniques for financial market price prediction. The approach involves data preprocessing, feature engineering, and model evaluation using daily and 5-minute interval records. Leveraging methods like K-Nearest Neighbors, Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, Random Forest, Support Vector Machines, Multi-Layer Perceptron and Long Short-Term Memory networks, the models exhibit distinct strengths and limitations. Notably, the LSTM model achieved an accuracy of 63%, while Random Forest demonstrated 60% accuracy, indicating promising results for intraday trading. It is essential to acknowledge that due to the exclusion of night hours, the approach is tailored specifically for intraday trading. This study offers a valuable approach to exchange rate prediction, providing an additional practical resource for practitioners and researchers in the field of financial market forecasting.
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Paper Nr: 209
Title:

Boosting GA Performance: A Fuzzy Approach to Uncertainty Issues Involving Parameters in Genetic Algorithms
Authors:

João R. Ferro, José S. Brito, Robério D. Santos, Roberta V. Lopes and Evandro B. Costa
Abstract: This article addresses issues involving two sources of uncertainty in the stochastic search problem based on a genetic algorithm approach. We improve the mutation rate parameter by fuzzifying the population diversity and the individual adaptation value. A relevant aspect of this investment is related to the fact that this parameter, which presents uncertainty of the possibilistic type, directly interferes with the uncertainty of the probabilistic type of the genetic algorithm and also in the convergence and quality of the solution found by the genetic algorithm. Moreover, in parallel, we improve the understanding behavior of selection and replacement methods. Experiments were carried out on the case study with the classic OneMax problem to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution, analyzing aspects such as the convergence time, the quality of the solution, and the diversity of the population. The results obtained through the treatment of uncertainty and its impacts are presented in this article, showing relevant performance for the proposed algorithm, with the respective treatment of uncertainties.
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Paper Nr: 219
Title:

Characterization of Normal and Abnormal Activities in a Cyber Operation Environment
Authors:

Abibat A. Lasisi and Ramoni O. Lasisi
Abstract: Data-driven research in the area of cybersecurity is important to understand improvements that enhance security of cyber-physical systems, and as well to develop new technologies that address cyber threats, breaches, and protection of network infrastructure. This paper employs techniques from machine learning and data analytics to attempt the problem of recognizing anomalous from normal activities in a dataset that represent behaviors of players in a cyber operating environment. Specifically, we consider the recently published BPF-extended tracking honeypot cybersecuirty dataset. We employed an unsupervised learning method, called k-means clustering to identify possible clusters and validate the optimal number of clusters in the dataset. We then provide characterization of each of the clusters, and show that one of the clusters contains abnormal activities. Thus, through understanding of these characterizations arising from the clusters in the cyber operating environment, potential new methods and/or approaches to confront these cyber attacks may be devised.
Paper Nr: 231
Title:

Performance Assessment of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and Photogrammetry for 3D Reconstruction of Man-Made and Natural Features
Authors:

Abhinav J. Polimera, M. P. Mohan and K. Rajitha
Abstract: The present study focuses on the reconstruction of 3D models of an antenna (man-made) and a bush (natural feature) by adopting the recently developed Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) technique of deep learning. The performance of the NeRF was compared with the outcomes obtained by the traditional photogrammetry methods. The ground truth geometric observation of the selected objects derived using electronic distance measurement-based techniques revealed the efficacy of NeRF compared to photogrammetry for both man-made and natural features’ reconstruction cases. The capabilities of NeRF to reconstruct the features with complex geometries were evident from the outcome of bush 3D reconstruction. The prospectus of canopy and leaf level geometry estimation using NeRF will aid the enhanced modeling of vegetation-atmosphere interactions. The findings presented in the study have significant implications for diverse fields, from entertainment to ecological modeling, and offer insights into the practical applications of NeRF in 3D reconstruction. The outcomes of the present study attempted with a texture-less object like a bush unveiled the opportunities to apply the NeRF techniques in precision agriculture.
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Paper Nr: 243
Title:

Heuristic Feedback for Generator Support in Generative Adversarial Network
Authors:

Dawid Połap and Antoni Jaszcz
Abstract: The possibilities of using generative adversarial networks (GANs) are enormous due to the possibility of generating new data that can deceive the classifier. The zero-sum game between two networks is a solution used on an increasingly large scale in today’s world. In this paper, we focus on expanding the model of generative adversarial networks by introducing a block with a selected heuristic algorithm. The additional block allows for creating a set of features extracted from the discriminator. The heuristic algorithm is based on the analysis of feature maps and extracting the position of selected pixels. Then they are clustered into averaged sets of features and used on created images by the generator. If the specified number of points within any set of features is higher than the threshold value, then the generator performs classical training. Otherwise, the loss function is subject to the penalty function. The proposed mechanism affects the operation of the GAN through additional sample analysis concerning containing specific features. To analyze the solution and impact of the proposed heuristic feedback, tests were performed based on known data sets.
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Paper Nr: 250
Title:

FEAT: A Fast, Effective, and Feasible Model for Molecular Property Prediction Based on Graph Neural Network
Authors:

Mukesh K. Rohil and Ishan Sharma
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence based methods and algorithms are being increasingly used by chemists to perform various tasks that would be rather difficult to perform using conventional methods. Whenever scientists design a new set of molecules for certain application, they need to experimentally validate if it possesses the desirable properties. Such (iterative) methods are often expensive and time-consuming. In the realm of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the molecules can themselves be viewed as graphs present in nature with bonds as edges and nodes as atoms. Therefore, it is worthwhile to exploit Graph Neural Networks for extracting the structural properties of these atoms and bonds, so as to further leverage these to predict the properties of these molecules (represented as graphs) as a whole. We propose a Graph Neural Network based model, FEAT, for this purpose. FEAT’s performance has been evaluated on multiple publicly available datasets and the results obtained are promising.
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Paper Nr: 260
Title:

Multicriteria Analysis of the Robotic Systems Autonomy Using Fuzzy Calculations
Authors:

Sergey Sokolov and Vladimir Sudakov
Abstract: Against the background of the ever-increasing needs for robotic systems (RS) with an increased degree of autonomy and the emerging transition to their widespread use, the need for technologies for quality assessment and multi-criteria analysis of the autonomy degree of such devices is becoming more urgent. The article describes the current state of issues assessing and comparing the degree of autonomy of unmanned systems using the vector criterion. Well-known estimates of the degree of autonomy are given. The existing classification system distinguishes between informational and intellectual autonomy, which are considered in close connection. Solutions are proposed that make it possible to formulate estimates of the autonomy degree of robots in various areas of economics based on the theory of fuzzy sets. Based on the method of fuzzy areas of preference, it becomes possible to obtain estimates of the degree of autonomy, taking into account the judgments of the decision-maker. One of the positive consequences of this approach is the unification of formulations and solutions in the tasks of information support in the RS, which, in turn, facilitates interaction between users, customers and developers.
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Paper Nr: 264
Title:

Climate-Friendly Online Shopping Within the Green eCommerce Project: A Fitting Tool to Determine T-Shirt Sizes Using Active Depth Sensing
Authors:

Alexander K. Seewald, Thomas Wernbacher, Thomas Winter, Mario Platzer and Alexander Pfeiffer
Abstract: Within the context of the Green eCommerce project where we build tailored add-ons for webshops to increase climate-friendly shipping, we analyzed reasons for returns using a modified rule learning algorithm but found no actionable rules. However, since many returns are driven by wrong size information, we have also developed a prototype Fitting Tool app that uses active depth sensing to measure several relevant body measurements and uses these to estimate T-Shirt sizes. Although these body measurements could be shown to be quite precise, T-Shirt sizes could only be predicted at low accuracy. On the other hand, self-reporting by test users showed that the perceived accuracy was considered 1.5-3x higher. Analyzing this issue, it was found that the reason for this is most likely manufacturer bias in reported size, which will be addressed in future work.
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Paper Nr: 266
Title:

A Multi-Task Learning Framework for Image Restoration Using a Novel Generative Adversarial Network
Authors:

Rim Walha, Fadoua Drira and Rania Bedhief
Abstract: In the last years, deep learning has gained growing popularity in image restoration, becoming the efficient mainstream for the subsequent higher level computer vision processing tasks. In particular, image restoration is a challenging task due to the high variations of degradations faced in the real-world scenarios. In this study, we introduce an efficient multi-task generative adversarial learning based framework as a practical solution suitable for various types of image degradations. We apply recent advancements in deep learning to design, build and train such a framework that can deal with several image restoration tasks treated simultaneously. More precisely, the main specificities of the proposed architecture are: (1) the introduction of a novel generator based on an encoder with separate decoders, (2) the utilization of low-level multi-scale features within the encoder component of our architecture, (3) the incorporation of the multi-scale transformer technique in each decoder in order to learn and share the low-level features representations among different tasks. Our experimental study demonstrates the efficiency and the robustness of the proposed framework for two specific image restoration tasks including image deblurring and image denoising. Moreover, it achieves high performance results that exceed those of state-of-the-art methods when evaluated on the same datasets.
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Paper Nr: 270
Title:

CT to MRI Image Translation Using CycleGAN: A Deep Learning Approach for Cross-Modality Medical Imaging
Authors:

Anamika Jha and Hitoshi Iima
Abstract: Medical imaging plays a crucial role in healthcare, with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed tomography (CT) as key modalities, each having unique strengths and weaknesses. MRI offers exceptional soft tissue contrast, but it is slow and costly, while CT is faster but involves ionizing radiation. To address this paradox, we leverage deep learning, employing CycleGAN to translate CT scans into MRI-like images. This approach eliminates the need for additional radiation exposure or costs. Our results, which show the effectiveness of our image translation method with an MAE of 0.5309, MSE of 0.37901, and PSNR of 52.344, demonstrate the promise of this invention in lowering healthcare costs, expanding diagnostic capabilities, and improving patient outcomes. The model was trained for 500 epochs with a batch size of 500 on an Nvidia GPU, RTX A6OOO.
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Paper Nr: 272
Title:

Nudging Automated Planners with Learned User Preferences
Authors:

Fusun Yaman, Thomas C. Eskridge, Ron Scott, Li Lin, Jeff Miller and Daniel Carpenter
Abstract: Automated planning tools play a large and expanding role in the function of many parts of our lives. The complex nature of the planning problem and the increasing amount of information the human planner must synthesize indicate that assistive automation must soon become the norm. Despite this, many existing automated planners are incapable of producing plans that reflect the desires and expertise of their operators. They do not have the direct ability to consider the operators’ priorities, nor can they exploit expert operational knowledge that comes from human experience and not data systems. In this paper we present methods to learn operator planning preferences and then nudge our automated logistic planner to produce plans that are better aligned with operator preferences without changing the code of the planner.
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Paper Nr: 273
Title:

Semantic Segmentation for Moon Rock Recognition Using U-Net with Pyramid-Pooling-Based SE Attention Blocks
Authors:

Antoni Jaszcz and Dawid Połap
Abstract: Analysis of data from the rover’s camera is an important element in the proper operation of unmanned vehicles. This is important because of the ability to move, avoid obstacles and even collect samples. In this paper, we propose a new U-Net architecture for rock/boulder recognition on the surface of the moon. For this purpose, architecture is composed of Squeeze and Excitation blocks extended with Pyramid Pooling and Convolution. As a result, such a network can pay attention to individual channels and give them weights based on global data. Moreover, the network analyzes contextual information in terms of local/global features in individual channels which allows for more accurate object segmentation. The proposed solution was tested on a publicly available database, achieving an accuracy of 97.23% and IoU of 0.7905.
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Paper Nr: 283
Title:

Heimatkunde: Dataset for Multi-Modal Historical Document Analysis
Authors:

Josef Baloun, Václav Honzík, Ladislav Lenc, Jiří Martínek and Pavel Král
Abstract: This paper introduces a novel Heimatkunde dat aset comprising printed documents in German, specifically designed for evaluating layout analysis methods with a focus on multi-modality. The dataset is openly accessible for research purposes. The study further presents baseline results for instance segmentation and multi-modal element classification. Three advanced models, Mask R-CNN, YOLOv8, and LayoutLMv3, are employed for instance segmentation, while a fusion-based model integrating BERT and various vision Transformers are proposed for multi-modal classification. Experimental findings reveal that optimal bounding box segmentation is achieved with YOLOv8 using an input image size of 1280 pixels, and the best segmentation mask is produced by LayoutLMv3 with PubLayNet weights. Moreover, the research demonstrates superior multi-modal classification results using BERT for textual and Vision Transformer for image modalities. The study concludes by suggesting the integration of the proposed models into the historical Porta fontium portal to enhance the information retrieval from historical data.
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Paper Nr: 287
Title:

Towards Knowledge-Augmented Agents for Efficient and Interpretable Learning in Sequential Decision Problems
Authors:

Reem Alansary and Nourhan Ehab
Abstract: The advantages of neurosymbolic systems as solvers of sequential decision problems have captured the attention of reseachers in the field of AI. The combination of perception and cognition allows for constructing learning agents with memory. In this position paper, we argue that the decision-making abilities of such knowledge-augmented solvers transcend those of black-box function approximators alone as the former can generalize through inductive reasoning to behave optimally in unknown states and still remain fully or partially interpretable. We present a novel approach leveraging a knowledge base structured as a layered directed acyclic graph, facilitating reasoned generalization in the absence of complete information.
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Paper Nr: 289
Title:

Cost-Aware TrE-ND: Tri-embed Noise Detection for Enhancing Data Quality of Knowledge Graph
Authors:

Jumana Alsubhi, Abdulrahman Gharawi and Lakshmish Ramaswamy
Abstract: In the realm of machine learning, knowledge graphs (KGs) are increasingly utilized for a wide range of tasks, such as question-answering, recommendation systems, and natural language processing. These KGs are inherently susceptible to noise, whether they are constructed manually or automatically. Existing techniques often fail to precisely identify these noisy triples, thereby compromising the utility of KGs for downstream applications. In addition, manual noise detection is costly, with costs ranging from $2 to $6 per triple. This highlights the need for cost-effective solutions, especially for large KGs. To tackle this problem, we introduce Tri-embed Noise Detection (TrE-ND), a highly accurate and cost-efficient noise detection approach for KGs. TrE-ND combines semantic depth, hierarchical modeling, and scalability for robust noise detection in large knowledge graphs. We also evaluate the overall quality of these KGs using the TrE-ND approach. We validate TrE-ND through comprehensive experiments on widely recognized KG datasets, namely, FB13 and WN11, each containing varying degrees of noise. Our findings demonstrate a substantial improvement in noise detection and KG evaluation accuracy as compared to existing methods. By utilizing the TrE-ND approach, we manage to flag noisy triples with an average approximate accuracy of 87%, even when up to 40% of the dataset contains noise. This simplifies the subsequent verification process by domain experts and makes it more cost-effective. Therefore, our proposed method offers a viable solution for efficiently addressing the persistent issue of noise in KGs. This work also paves the way for future research in cost-aware noise mitigation techniques and their applications in various domains.
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Paper Nr: 294
Title:

GOLOG++ Hits the (Right) Spot: Interfacing Golog with a Quadruped Rescue Robot for High-Level Missions
Authors:

Maximillian Kirsch, Shubham Pawar, Alexander Ferrein and Stefan Schiffer
Abstract: The Robot Operating System has become the de facto standard middleware in the robotics field. ROS offers a large variety of state-of-the-art algorithms and solutions for robotics problems ranging from localisation to manipulator control. For most robot systems available on the market, a ROS or ROS2 driver exists. When it comes to high-level control, relatively few packages and approaches exist inside the ROS ecosystem. In this paper, we report on our efforts to integrate the well-known action language GOLOG with ROS2 in order to enable rescue missions for our Boston Dynamic Spot robot in the RoboCup Rescue scenario.
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Paper Nr: 298
Title:

Transition of Model Performance in Dependence of the Amount of Data Corruption with Respect to Network Sizes
Authors:

Thomas Seidler and Markus Abel
Abstract: An important question for machine learning model concerns the achievable quality or performance of a model with respect to given data. In other words, we want to answer the question how robust a model is with respect to perturbation of the data. From statistical mechanics, a standard way to ”corrupt” input data is a study that uses additive noise to perturb data. This, in turn, corresponds to typical situations in processing data from any sensor as measurement noise. Larger models will often perform better, because they are able to capture more variance of the data. However, if the information content cannot be retrieved due to too large data corruptions a large network cannot compensate noise effects and no performance is gained by scaling the network. Here we study systematically the said effect, we add diffusive noise of increasing strength on a logarithmic scale to some well-known datasets for classification. As a result, we observe a sharp transition in training and test accuracy as a function of the noise strength. In addition, we study if the size of a network can counterbalance the described noise. The transition observed resembles a phase transition as described in the framework of statistical mechanics. We draw an analogy between systems in statistical mechanics and Machine Learning systems that suggests general upper bounds for certain types of problems, described as the tuple (data, model). This is a fundamental result that may have large impact on practical applications.
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Paper Nr: 303
Title:

Towards a Biologically-Plausible Computational Model of Human Language Cognition
Authors:

Hilton Alers-Valentín and Sandiway Fong
Abstract: The biolinguistics approach aims to construct a coherent and biologically plausible model/theory of human language as a computational system coded in the brain that for each individual recursively generates an infinite array of hierarchically structured expressions interpreted at the interfaces for thought and externalization. Language is a recent development in human evolution, is acquired reflexively from impoverished data, and shares common properties through the species in spite of individual diversity. Universal Grammar, a genuine explanation of language, must meet these apparently contradictory requirements. The Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT) proposes that all phenomena of language have a principled account rooted in efficient computation, which makes language a perfect solution to interface conditions. LLMs, albeit their remarkable performance, cannot achieve the explanatory adequacy necessary for a language competence model. We im-plemented a computer model assuming these challenges, only using language-specific operations, relations, and procedures satisfying SMT. As a plausible model of human language, the implementation can put to test cutting-edge syntactic theory within the generative enterprise. Successful derivations obtained through the model signal the feasibility of the minimalist framework, shed light on specific proposals on the processing of structural ambiguity, and help to explore fundamental questions about the nature of the Workspace.
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Paper Nr: 313
Title:

Parkinson’s Disease Detection Through Inertial Signals and Posture Insights
Authors:

Manuel Gil-Martín, Sergio Esteban-Romero, Fernando Fernández-Martínez and Rubén San-Segundo
Abstract: In the development of deep learning systems aimed at detecting Parkinson's Disease (PD) using inertial sensors, some aspects could be essential to refine tremor detection methodologies in realistic scenarios. This work analyses the effect of the subjects’ posture during tremor recordings and the required amount of data to assess a proper PD detection in a Leave-One-Subject-Out Cross-Validation (LOSO CV) scenario. We propose a deep learning architecture that learns a PD biomarker from accelerometer signals to classify subjects between healthy and PD patients. This study uses the PD-BioStampRC21 dataset, containing accelerometer recordings from healthy and PD participants equipped with five inertial sensors. An increment of performance was obtained when using sitting windows compared to using lying windows for Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) input signal domain. Moreover, using 5 minutes per subject could be sufficient to properly evaluate the PD status of a patient without losing performance, reaching a windowlevel accuracy of 77.71 ± 1.07 % and a user-level accuracy of 87.10 ± 11.80 %. Furthermore, a knowledge transfer could be performed when training the system with sitting instances and testing with lying examples, indicating that the sitting activity contains valuable information that allows an effective generalization to lying instances.
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Paper Nr: 320
Title:

Classifying Words with 3-sort Automata
Authors:

Tomasz Jastrząb, Frédéric Lardeux and Éric Monfroy
Abstract: Grammatical inference consists in learning a language or a grammar from data. In this paper, we consider a number of models for inferring a non-deterministic finite automaton (NFA) with 3 sorts of states, that must accept some words, and reject some other words from a given sample. We then propose a transformation from this 3-sort NFA into weighted-frequency and probabilistic NFA, and we apply the latter to a classification task. The experimental evaluation of our approach shows that the probabilistic NFAs can be successfully applied for classification tasks on both real-life and superficial benchmark data sets.
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Paper Nr: 328
Title:

Digital Discrimination Detection in Ridesharing Services in Rio de Janeiro City
Authors:

Raquel T. Paiva, Wendy S. Cataldo, Ana B. Garcia and Carlos E. R. de Mello
Abstract: The urban transport sector has been significantly transformed by technology. However, the adoption of these applications has also brought to light important social issues, including the cancellation of rides due to bias. The objective of this work is to analyze digital discrimination in light of a complex system and address it through the analysis of crowd data, which can guide mechanisms to dissuade discrimination in digital services. Our main motivation is to answer the following research questions: RQ1: Is there evidence of digital discrimination in the ridesharing services of Rio de Janeiro city? RQ2: Is it possible to identify the factors that lead to discrimination? RQ3: What are the key concepts regarding Digital Discrimination detection in a ridesharing service? RQ4: Could Machine Learning techniques accurately identify discrimination and their key variables that can be used in actions to mitigate this behavior?
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Paper Nr: 339
Title:

GENERATION: An Efficient Denoising Autoencoders-Based Approach for Amputated Image Reconstruction
Authors:

Leila Ben Othman, Parisa Niloofar and Sadok Ben Yahia
Abstract: Missing values in datasets pose a significant challenge, often leading to biased analyses and suboptimal model performance. This study shows a way to fill in missing values using Denoising AutoEncoders (DAE), a type of artificial neural network that is known for being able to learn stable ways to represent data. The observed data are used to train the DAE, and then they are used to fill in missing values. Extensive tests on different image datasets, taking into account different mechanisms of missing data and percentages of missingness, are used to see how well this method works. The results of the experiments show that the DAE-based imputation works better than other imputation methods, especially when it comes to handling informative missingness mechanisms.
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Paper Nr: 347
Title:

Curvature-Informed Attention Mechanism for Long Short-Term Memory Networks
Authors:

Lynda Ayachi
Abstract: Time series forecasting is a crucial task across diverse domains, and recent research focuses on refining model architectures for enhanced predictive capabilities. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach by integrating curvature measures into an attention mechanism alongside Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. The objective is to improve the interpretability and overall performance of time series forecasting models. The proposed Curvature-Informed Attention Mechanism (CIAM) enhances learning by personalizing the weight attribution within the attention mechanism. Through comprehensive experimental evaluations on real-world datasets, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, showcasing competitive forecasting accuracy compared to traditional LSTM models.
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Paper Nr: 349
Title:

Relevant Facial Key Parts and Feature Points for Emotion Recognition
Authors:

Rim Afdhal, Ridha Ejbali and Mourad Zaied
Abstract: Interaction between people is more than just verbal communication. According to scientific researches, human beings trust a lot on non-verbal techniques of communication, particularly communication and understanding each other via facial expressions. Facial expressions are more descriptive in situations where words fail, such as a surprise or a shock. In addition, lying via spoken words is harder to notice compared to faking expressions. Focusing on geometric positions of facial key parts and well detecting them is the best strategy to boost the classification rates of emotion recognition systems. The goal of this paper is to find the most relevant part of human face which is responsible to express a given emotion using feature points and to define a primary emotion by a minimum number of characteristic points. The proposed system contains four main parts: the face detection, the points location, the information extraction, and finally the classification.
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Paper Nr: 352
Title:

Enhancing Portfolio Performance: A Random Forest Approach to Volatility Prediction and Optimization
Authors:

Vedant Rathi, Meghana Kshirsagar and Conor Ryan
Abstract: Machine learning has diverse applications in various domains, including disease diagnosis in healthcare, user behavior analysis, and algorithmic trading. However, machine learning’s use in portfolio volatility predictions and optimization has only been recently explored and requires further investigation to prove valuable in real-world settings. We thus propose an effective method that accomplishes both these tasks and is targeted at people who are new to the realm of finance. This paper explores (a) a novel approach of using supervised machine learning with the Random Forest algorithm to predict portfolio volatility value and categorization and (b) a flexible method taking into account users’ restrictions on stock allocations to build an optimized and customized portfolio. Our framework also allows a diversified number of assets to be included in the portfolio. We train our model using historical asset prices collected over 8 years for six mutual funds and one cryptocurrency. We validate our results by comparing the volatility predictions against recent asset prices obtained from Yahoo Finance. The research underlines the importance of harnessing the power of machine learning to improve portfolio performance.
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Paper Nr: 373
Title:

Auditing Fairness and Explainability in Chest X-Ray Image Classifiers
Authors:

Gemma B. Bordes and Alan Perotti
Abstract: Advancements in Artificial Intelligence have produced several tools that can be used in medical decision support systems. However, these models often exhibit the so-called ’black-box problem’: an algorithmic diagnosis is produced, but no human-understandable details about the decision process can be obtained. This raises critical questions about fairness and explainability, crucial for equitable healthcare. In this paper we focus on chest X-ray image classification, auditing the reproducibility of previous results in terms of model bias, exploring the applicability of Explainable AI (XAI) techniques, and auditing the fairness of the produced explanations. We highlight the challenges in assessing the quality of explanations provided by XAI methods, particularly in the absence of ground truth. In turn, this strongly hampers the possibility of comparing explanation quality across patients sub-groups, which is a cornerstone in fairness audits. Our experiments illustrate the complexities in achieving transparent AI interpretations in medical diagnostics, underscoring the need both for reliable XAI techniques and more robust fairness auditing methods.
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Paper Nr: 375
Title:

Planning Base Poses and Object Grasp Choices for Table-Clearing Tasks Using Dynamic Programming
Authors:

Sune L. Sørensen, Lakshadeep Naik, Peter T. Nguyen, Aljaz Kramberger, Leon Bodenhagen, Mikkel B. Kjærgaard and Norbert Krüger
Abstract: Given a setup with external cameras and a mobile manipulator with an eye-in-hand camera, we address the problem of computing a sequence of base poses and grasp choices that allows for clearing objects from a table while minimizing the overall execution time. The first step in our approach is to construct a world model, which is generated by an anchoring process, using information from the external cameras. Next, we developed a planning module which – based on the contents of the world model - is able to create a plausible plan for reaching base positions and suitable grasp choices keeping execution time minimal. Comparing our approach to two baseline methods shows that the average execution cost of plans computed by our approach is 40% lower than the naive baseline and 33% lower than the heuristic-based baseline. Furthermore, we integrate our approach in a demonstrator, undertaking the full complexity of the problem.
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Paper Nr: 380
Title:

A Soft Constraint-Based Framework for Ethical Reasoning
Authors:

Hiroshi Hosobe and Ken Satoh
Abstract: Artificial intelligence is becoming more widely used for making decisions in many application areas, where it often needs to consider legal rules and ethical norms. However, ethical norms are more difficult to treat than legal rules that have logical nature. Taheri et al. proposed a framework that formalized several important aspects of ethical decision making. However, their framework is still not powerful enough for more general problem solving. In this paper, we propose a soft constraint-based framework for ethical reasoning. Especially by devising the notion of norm constraints, we integrate Taheri et al.’s framework into Borning et al.’s constraint hierarchy framework for treating soft constraints. We also present a case study on the application of our framework to ethical reasoning.
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Paper Nr: 382
Title:

Multi-Agent Archive-Based Inverse Reinforcement Learning by Improving Suboptimal Experts
Authors:

Shunsuke Ueki and Keiki Takadama
Abstract: This paper proposes the novel Multi-Agent Inverse Reinforcement Learning method that can acquire reward functions in continuous state space by improving the “suboptimal” expert behaviors. Specifically, the proposed method archives the superior “individual” behaviors of the agent without taking an account of other agents, selects the “cooperative” behaviors that can cooperate with other agents from the individual behaviors, and improve expert behaviors according to both the individual and cooperative behaviors to obtain the better behaviors of the agents than those of experts. The experiments based on the maze problem in a continuous state space have been revealed the following implications (1) the suboptimal expert trajectories that may collide with the other agents can be improved to the trajectories that can avoid the collision among the agents; and (2) the number of collisions of agents and the expected return in the proposed method is smaller/larger than those in MA-GAIL and MA-AIRL.
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Paper Nr: 391
Title:

Explainable Large Language Models & iContracts
Authors:

Georgios Stathis
Abstract: Contract automation is a field of LegalTech under Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Law that is currently undergoing a transition from Smart to Intelligent Contracts (iContracts). iContracts aim to full contracting automation. Their main challenge is finding a convincing direction for market adoption. Two powerful market factors are the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI Regulation. The article investigates how the two factors are able to influence the market adoption of iContracts. Our Research Question reads: to what extent is it possible to accelerate the adoption of Intelligent Contracts with Explainable Large Language Models? Following a literature review our research employs three methodologies: market gap analysis, case study, and application. The results show a clear way for iContracts to follow, based on existing market gaps. Moreover, they validate whether the application of Explainable LLMs is possible. The discussion clarifies the main limitations with Explainable LLMs. Our conclusion is that the two factors are impactful for so long as the market adoption attempts to bridge the gap between innovators and early adopters.
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Area 2 - Agents

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 32
Title:

Interactively Teaching an Inverse Reinforcement Learner with Limited Feedback
Authors:

Rustam Zayanov, Francisco S. Melo and Manuel Lopes
Abstract: We study the problem of teaching via demonstrations in sequential decision-making tasks. In particular, we focus on the situation when the teacher has no access to the learner’s model and policy, and the feedback from the learner is limited to trajectories that start from states selected by the teacher. The necessity to select the starting states and infer the learner’s policy creates an opportunity for using the methods of inverse reinforcement learning and active learning by the teacher. In this work, we formalize the teaching process with limited feedback and propose an algorithm that solves this teaching problem. The algorithm uses a modified version of the active value-at-risk method to select the starting states, a modified maximum causal entropy algorithm to infer the policy, and the difficulty score ratio method to choose the teaching demonstrations. We test the algorithm in a synthetic car driving environment and conclude that the proposed algorithm is an effective solution when the learner’s feedback is limited.
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Paper Nr: 126
Title:

Comparing Variable Handling Strategies in BDI Agents: Experimental Study
Authors:

Frantisek Vidensky, Frantisek Zboril, Jan Beran, Radek Koci and Frantisek V. Zboril
Abstract: BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) agents represent a paradigm in artificial intelligence, demonstrating proficiency in reasoning, planning, and decision-making. They offer a versatile framework to construct intelligent agents capable of reasoning about their beliefs, desires, and intentions. Our research focuses on AgentSpeak(L), a popular BDI language, and its interpreter using late variable bindings. Unlike traditional interpreters, it defers substitution selection until execution, enhancing rationality by preventing premature, erroneous selections. To validate our approach, we conducted experiments in a virtual collectable card marketplace. We implemented a system that can use both late and early variable binding strategies, comparing their performance. In shared and independent experiments, the late bindings strategy outperformed the early bindings strategy, although overhead costs were observed. We also conduct a brief discussion of the situations in which it is appropriate to use late bindings given the structure of the declared plans.
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Paper Nr: 173
Title:

Q-Defense: When Q-Learning Comes to Help Proof-of-Work Against the Selfish Mining Attack
Authors:

Ali Nikhalat-Jahromi, Ali M. Saghiri and Mohammad R. Meybodi
Abstract: The Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus protocol is widely utilized in various blockchain implementations, including Bitcoin. The security of this protocol relies heavily on the incentive-compatibility of participating miner, who compete against each other to discover new blocks. However, the assumption that competition will naturally evolve into collaboration, ensuring blockchain security, is not always valid. Certain colluding miners, known as ”selfish miners ,” attempt to unfairly obtain rewards by deviating from the prescribed protocol. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-based mechanism to address this challenge and enhance the PoW protocol. Specifically, we apply Q-Learning, a prominent technique in reinforcement learning, to each miner in order to mitigate the impact of selfish collaboration among colluding miners. To best of our knowledge, this is the first defense mechanism based on Q-Learning in the literature. Our comprehensive analysis demonstrates that the proposed modification to the PoW protocol can increase the threshold for successful selfish mining attacks from 25% to 40%. Furthermore, simulation results comparing our defense mechanism with tie-breaking, a well-known defense approach, validate the effectiveness of our proposed mechanism.
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Paper Nr: 177
Title:

Multi-Agent Path Finding with Continuous Time Using SAT Modulo Linear Real Arithmetic
Authors:

Tomáš Kolárik, Stefan Ratschan and Pavel Surynek
Abstract: This paper introduces a new approach to solving a continuous-time version of the multi-agent path finding problem. The algorithm translates the problem into an extension of the classical Boolean satisfiability problem, satisfiability modulo theories (SMT), that can be solved by off-the-shelf solvers. This enables the exploitation of conflict generalization techniques that such solvers can handle. Computational experiments show that the new approach scales better with respect to the available computation time than state-of-the art approaches and is usually able to avoid their exponential behavior on a class of benchmark problems modeling a typical bottleneck situation.
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Paper Nr: 185
Title:

Aquarium: A Comprehensive Framework for Exploring Predator-Prey Dynamics Through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
Authors:

Michael Kölle, Yannick Erpelding, Fabian Ritz, Thomy Phan, Steffen Illium and Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Abstract: Recent advances in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning have prompted the modeling of intricate interactions between agents in simulated environments. In particular, the predator-prey dynamics have captured substantial interest and various simulations been tailored to unique requirements. To prevent further time-intensive developments, we introduce Aquarium, a comprehensive Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning environment for predator-prey interaction, enabling the study of emergent behavior. Aquarium is open source and offers a seamless integration of the PettingZoo framework, allowing a quick start with proven algorithm implementations. It features physics-based agent movement on a two-dimensional, edge-wrapping plane. The agent-environment interaction (observations, actions, rewards) and the environment settings (agent speed, prey reproduction, predator starvation, and others) are fully customizable. Besides a resource-efficient visualization, Aquarium supports to record video files, providing a visual comprehension of agent behavior. To demonstrate the environment’s capabilities, we conduct preliminary studies which use PPO to train multiple prey agents to evade a predator. In accordance to the literature, we find Individual Learning to result in worse performance than Parameter Sharing, which significantly improves coordination and sample-efficiency.
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Paper Nr: 188
Title:

Multi-Agent Quantum Reinforcement Learning Using Evolutionary Optimization
Authors:

Michael Kölle, Felix Topp, Thomy Phan, Philipp Altmann, Jonas Nüßlein and Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Abstract: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning is becoming increasingly more important in times of autonomous driving and other smart industrial applications. Simultaneously a promising new approach to Reinforcement Learning arises using the inherent properties of quantum mechanics, reducing the trainable parameters of a model significantly. However, gradient-based Multi-Agent Quantum Reinforcement Learning methods often have to struggle with barren plateaus, holding them back from matching the performance of classical approaches. We build upon an existing approach for gradient free Quantum Reinforcement Learning and propose tree approaches with Variational Quantum Circuits for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning using evolutionary optimization. We evaluate our approach in the Coin Game environment and compare them to classical approaches. We showed that our Variational Quantum Circuit approaches perform significantly better compared to a neural network with a similar amount of trainable parameters. Compared to the larger neural network, our approaches archive similar results using 97.88% less parameters.
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Paper Nr: 189
Title:

A Reinforcement Learning Environment for Directed Quantum Circuit Synthesis
Authors:

Michael Kölle, Tom Schubert, Philipp Altmann, Maximilian Zorn, Jonas Stein and Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Abstract: With recent advancements in quantum computing technology, optimizing quantum circuits and ensuring reliable quantum state preparation have become increasingly vital. Traditional methods often demand extensive expertise and manual calculations, posing challenges as quantum circuits grow in qubit- and gate-count. Therefore, harnessing machine learning techniques to handle the growing variety of gate-to-qubit combinations is a promising approach. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive reinforcement learning environment for quantum circuit synthesis, where circuits are constructed utilizing gates from the the Clifford+T gate set to prepare specific target states. Our experiments focus on exploring the relationship between the depth of synthesized quantum circuits and the circuit depths used for target initialization, as well as qubit count. We organize the environment configurations into multiple evaluation levels and include a range of well-known quantum states for benchmarking purposes. We also lay baselines for evaluating the environment using Proximal Policy Optimization. By applying the trained agents to benchmark tests, we demonstrated their ability to reliably design minimal quantum circuits for a selection of 2-qubit Bell states.
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Paper Nr: 233
Title:

Multi-Agent Path Finding: Policies Instead of Plans
Authors:

Jakub Mestek and Roman Barták
Abstract: The task of Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) problem is to find collision-free plans for a set of agents moving from their starting locations to their destinations. In the classical variant of MAPF, a plan for an agent is a sequence of actions. In this paper, we suggest a novel approach to solving this problem in a non-deterministic environment – constructing a solution in the form of policies (one for each agent). The policy prescribes the agent which action it should take in a given situation described by a location and a timestep.
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Paper Nr: 257
Title:

Integrated Simulation Approach for Dynamic Distributed Evacuation Guidance Under Fire Spread and Rare but Catastrophic Events
Authors:

Akira Tsurushima
Abstract: The dynamics of smoke, fire, and toxic gases inside a building is complex and difficult to predict. Models have been used to analyze and develop efficient evacuation protocols for fire-spread evacuation situations. In this study, an integrated model that includes fire spread, evacuation agent, and evacuation guidance signage models, is developed as an efficient control mechanism for a dynamically distributed evacuation guidance system. This mechanism is based on Tsurushima’s distributed algorithm, which does not assume any central control and only requires local information in providing efficient evacuation guidance, thereby minimizing total evacuation time while directing evacuees away from hazards. The parameters of the mechanism were calibrated to mitigate the occurrence of low-probability catastrophic events, which is crucial in the development of evacuation guidance protocols.
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Paper Nr: 271
Title:

A Framework for Studying Communication Pathways in Machine Learning-Based Agent-to-Agent Communication
Authors:

Sathish Purushothaman, Michael Granitzer, Florian Lemmerich and Jelena Mitrovic
Abstract: : The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has increased the relevance of agent-to-agent communication, particularly in systems where agents learn from their interactions. However, current LLMs offer limited insights into the communication dynamics among multiple agents, especially in large-scale settings when multiple agents are involved. Particularly training LLMs - in contrast to in-context learning - becomes nearly infeasible without large-scale computing infrastructure. In our work we present a machine-learning based agent framework to investigate the role of different communication pathways for studying language emergence between machine learning-based agents. We designed a transformer-based image auto-encoder as the agent architecture. A Gumbel SoftMax layer encodes images in form of symbols forming the language between agents. We study two pathways: In the first pathway, the sender reads an image and sends a message to the receiver. The receiver uses the message to reconstruct the sender’s image. In the second pathway, the sender and receiver read an image and minimize the distance between the generated symbols. In the first pathway, language emerges with the Levenshtein distance of ≤ 2 for 96% of messages. In the second pathway, no language emerges with the Levenshtein distance of ≤ 2 for 3% of messages.
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Paper Nr: 284
Title:

Exploring the Impact of Competing Narratives on Financial Markets I: An Opinionated Trader Agent-Based Model as a Practical Testbed
Authors:

Arwa Bokhari
Abstract: This paper introduces a framework to empirically investigate the influence of competing narratives on financial market dynamics. We present an agent-based model of traders in a financial market, where traders are driven by opinion dynamics and are subject to self-reinforcement, herding behaviors, and an accumulative response to new information. Our systematic approach includes isolating these factors, enabling a parametric analysis within the collective opinion dynamics of the market. Our simulation provides a testbed to evaluate various market scenarios. While our findings are based on simulated data and thus warrant caution in real-world interpretation, they offer important insights into market fluctuations. This study lays groundwork for further research on trader behavior and market dynamics, and we have made the source-code publicly available for replication and extension.
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Paper Nr: 330
Title:

Exploring the Impact of Competing Narratives on Financial Markets II: An Opinionated Trader Agent-Based Model with Dynamic Feedback
Authors:

Arwa Bokhari
Abstract: Employing an agent-based trading model integrated with opinion dynamics, we conduct a systematic exploration of the factors potentially contributing to financial market frenzies. Applying our previously established testbed described in detail in a companion paper (part I), we examine the influence of two competing narratives on three hypotheses: self-reinforcement; herding; and an additive response to inputs. Utilizing a real-world dataset, we investigate these dynamics. Our findings reveal that although all three hypotheses affect price movements, herding behavior has the most substantial impact. The source code for these simulations is avail-able on Github, allowing researchers to replicate and extend our work.
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Paper Nr: 381
Title:

Scalable Verification of Social Explainable AI by Variable Abstraction
Authors:

Wojciech Jamroga, Yan Kim and Damian Kurpiewski
Abstract: Social Explainable AI (SAI) is a new direction in artificial intelligence that emphasises decentralisation, trans-parency, social context, and focus on the human users. SAI research is still at an early stage, and concentrates mainly on delivering the intended functionalities. At the same time, formal analysis and verification of the proposed solutions is rare. In this paper, we present an approach to formal verification of SAI protocols by means of temporal model checking. We use agent graphs to model benign as well as malicious behaviors of the participants, branching-time logic formulas to express interesting properties of the protocol, and the state of the art temporal model checker UPPAAL to verify those formulas. As usual in such cases, state-space explosion and the resulting complexity of verification is a major problem. We show how to mitigate the complexity through state abstraction, and demonstrate the advantages in practice by using a novel tool for user-friendly abstractions EASYABSTRACT4UPPAAL.
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Paper Nr: 384
Title:

XGBoost Learning of Dynamic Wager Placement for In-Play Betting on an Agent-Based Model of a Sports Betting Exchange
Authors:

Chawin Terawong and Dave Cliff
Abstract: We present first results from the use of XGBoost, highly effective machine learning (ML) method, within the Bristol Betting Exchange (BBE), an open-source agent-based model (ABM) designed to simulate a contemporary sports-betting exchange with in-play betting during track-racing events such as horse races. We use the BBE ABM and its array of minimally-simple bettor-agents as a synthetic data generator which feeds into our XGBoost ML system, with the intention that XGboost discovers profitable dynamic betting strategies by learning from the more profitable bets made by the BBE bettor-agents. After this XGBoost training, which results in one or more decision trees, a bettor-agent with a betting strategy determined by the XGBoost-learned decision tree(s) is added to the BBE ABM and made to bet on a sequence of races under various conditions and betting-market scenarios, with profitability serving as the primary metric of comparison and evaluation. Our initial findings presented here show that XGBoost trained in this way can indeed learn profitable betting strategies, and can generalise to learn strategies that outperform each of the set of strategies used for creation of the training data. To foster further research and enhancements, the complete version of our extended BBE, including the XGBoost integration, has been made freely available as an open-source release on GitHub.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 22
Title:

Simulation Analysis of Evacuation Guidance Using Dynamic Distributed Signage
Authors:

Akira Tsurushima
Abstract: Evacuation guidance systems must be adaptive and distributed in the unstable and harsh environment of disaster evacuation. Numerous dynamic evacuation guidance systems have been proposed and studied; however, few of them focus on the unstable evacuation environment that makes computer systems unreliable and malfunctioning. In this study, we introduce a distributed algorithm for a dynamic evacuation guidance system to ensure safe and efficient evacuation, even in the face of system component failures. The system is designed to be resilient, allowing it to continue functioning, providing effective evacuation guidance despite partial system malfunctions. Simulation experiments showed that the distributed system can provide more efficient evacuation guidance than static guidance systems. Furthermore, it correctly guided evacuees in situations where the target exit changed during the evacuation, showcasing the system’s adaptability and effectiveness in handling unforeseen challenges, including system failures.
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Paper Nr: 48
Title:

Effects of Virtual-Teacher Appearance and Student Gender on Lesson Effectiveness in Teaching About Social Issues
Authors:

Tetsuya Matsui and Seiji Yamada
Abstract: Virtual teachers (VTs) are an area of focus for the practical application of virtual agents. We focused on a VT design method for teaching adults about social issues. On the basis of prior research, we hypothesized that a robot-like VT would be perceived by students as more neutral. To verify this hypothesis, we conducted a two-factor two-level experiment. One factor was the participants’ gender, and the other was the VTs’ appearance. We used two types of VTs: human-like and robot-like. In the experiment, these VTs gave a lesson about a quota system for females. The participants answered a questionnaire on how much they would favor introducing a quota system after watching a lesson movie presented by a VT. We conducted a two-way ANOVA for the result of the questionnaire. As a result, female participants were more strongly affected by the robot-like VT than the human-like VT. We suggest that this needs to be considered when designing VTs that teach about social issues.
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Paper Nr: 58
Title:

Parameter Estimation of Macroeconomic Agent-Based Models Using Evolutionary Computation
Authors:

Takahiro Obata and Setsuya Kurahashi
Abstract: This study reports the estimation of model parameters for a macroeconomic agent-based model (ABM) using evolutionary computation methods. In an ABM, the parameter settings of the model are important in terms of verifying the validity of its outputs, because the parameter settings are closely related to these outputs, and determining whether the set parameters are appropriate. Conventionally, model parameters are qualitatively set by researchers based on values confirmed from empirical studies in related fields. However, in recent years, attempts to quantitatively determine model parameters using metaheuristic methods and Bayesian estimation-based methods have become widespread. In this study, we attempted to estimate time-varying parameters using a real-coded genetic algorithm, a type of evolutionary computation method, based on an inverse simulation method, which has not been used in macroeconomic ABM parameter estimation. The analysis confirmed that parameter estimation works well when the economic conditions to be assimilated are simple, whereas it is difficult when economic conditions change in a short time, such as before and after economic shocks.
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Paper Nr: 73
Title:

Multi-Agent Monocular SLAM
Authors:

Pieter Beerten, Charles Hamesse and Rob Haelterman
Abstract: This article describes the development of an optimization method for multi-agent monocular SLAM systems. These systems allow autonomous robots to create a map of an unknown environment and to simultaneously localize themselves within it. The proposed multi-agent system combines measurements made by independent agents to increase the accuracy of the estimated poses of the agents and the created map. Our method is based on the single-agent monocular ORB-SLAM2 framework, and we develop a complete multi-agent optimization post-processing algorithm, effectively refining all camera trajectories and map points. Our experiments on the EuRoC machine hall dataset show that we can successfully combine the information of multiple SLAM agents to increase the accuracy of the estimated trajectories.
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Paper Nr: 84
Title:

Subgoal Reachability in Goal Conditioned Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Authors:

Michał Bortkiewicz, Jakub Łyskawa, Paweł Wawrzyński, Mateusz Ostaszewski, Artur Grudkowski, Bartłomiej Sobieski and Tomasz Trzciński
Abstract: Achieving long-term goals becomes more feasible when we break them into smaller, manageable subgoals. Yet, a crucial question arises: how specific should these subgoals be? Existing Goal-Conditioned Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning methods are based on lower-level policies aiming at subgoals designated by higher-level policies. These methods are sensitive to the proximity threshold under which the subgoals are considered achieved. Constant thresholds make the subgoals impossible to achieve in the early learning stages, easy to achieve in the late stages, and require careful manual tuning to yield reasonable overall learning performance. We argue that subgoal precision should depend on the agent’s recent performance rather than be predefined. We propose Adaptive Subgoal Required Distance (ASRD), a drop-in replacement method for subgoal threshold creation that considers the agent’s current lower-level capabilities for appropriate subgoals. Our results demonstrate that subgoal precision is essential for HRL convergence speed, and our method improves the performance of existing HRL algorithms.
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Paper Nr: 91
Title:

Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework with Representation Learning for Concurrent Negotiation
Authors:

Ryoga Miyajima and Katsuhide Fujita
Abstract: In the field of automated negotiation, significant attention has been paid to methods for learning negotiation strategies using reinforcement learning. However, in concurrent negotiation, where negotiation proceeds with multiple counterparties with various strategies in parallel, it is difficult to consider the differences in the strategies of counterparties using the conventional formulation in which the state is defined using the bids of both counterparties. In this study, we propose a reinforcement learning framework for learning negotiation strategies that considers the strategy models of the negotiation partners in concurrent negotiations. Strategy modeling is realized using embeddings with a representation function based on the unsupervised learning of generative–discriminative representations from negotiation log data. Through evaluation experiments, we show the performance of the representation function in identifying the strategies of negotiation partners and the effectiveness of introducing the representation function into the reinforcement learning of negotiation strategies.
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Paper Nr: 103
Title:

Clustering-Based Approach to Strategy Selection for Meta-Strategy in Automated Negotiation
Authors:

Hiroyasu Yoshino and Katsuhide Fujita
Abstract: This study aims to develop an automated negotiation meta-strategy and proposes an approach that automatically selects a strategy based on the opponent from a range of available strategies using clustering techniques. The proposed method groups the possible negotiation strategies into clusters and employs deep reinforcement learning to determine an effective bidding strategy for the representative point of each cluster. This strategy is optimized for the average agent within each cluster, consistently outperforming other agents in the same cluster. An analysis of the number of strategy clusters identified using the proposed method indicates that individual utility tends to increase when the number of clusters is limited. Notably, the highest utility is achieved when there are three clusters. In addition, negotiation simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach yields higher individual utility compared to the previous studies.
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Paper Nr: 140
Title:

Dynamic Path Planning for Autonomous Vehicles Using Adaptive Reinforcement Learning
Authors:

Karim Wahdan, Nourhan Ehab, Yasmin Mansy and Amr El Mougy
Abstract: This paper focuses on local dynamic path planning for autonomous vehicles, using an Adaptive Reinforcement Learning Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (ARL TD3) model. This model effectively navigates complex and unpredictable scenarios by adapting to changing environments. Testing, using simulations, shows improved path planning over static models, enhancing decision-making, trajectory optimization, and control. Challenges such as vehicle configuration, environmental factors, and top speed require further refinement. The model’s adaptability could be enhanced by integrating more data and exploring a fusion between supervised reinforcement learning and adaptive reinforcement learning techniques. This work advances autonomous vehicle path planning by introducing an ARL TD3 model for real-time decision-making in complex environments.
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Paper Nr: 190
Title:

Quantum Advantage Actor-Critic for Reinforcement Learning
Authors:

Michael Kölle, Mohamad Hgog, Fabian Ritz, Philipp Altmann, Maximilian Zorn, Jonas Stein and Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Abstract: Quantum computing offers efficient encapsulation of high-dimensional states. In this work, we propose a novel quantum reinforcement learning approach that combines the Advantage Actor-Critic algorithm with variational quantum circuits by substituting parts of the classical components. This approach addresses reinforcement learning’s scalability concerns while maintaining high performance. We empirically test multiple quantum Advantage Actor-Critic configurations with the well known Cart Pole environment to evaluate our approach in control tasks with continuous state spaces. Our results indicate that the hybrid strategy of using either a quantum actor or quantum critic with classical post-processing yields a substantial performance increase compared to pure classical and pure quantum variants with similar parameter counts. They further reveal the limits of current quantum approaches due to the hardware constraints of noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers, suggesting further research to scale hybrid approaches for larger and more complex control tasks.
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Paper Nr: 193
Title:

ClusterComm: Discrete Communication in Decentralized MARL Using Internal Representation Clustering
Authors:

Robert Müller, Hasan Turalic, Thomy Phan, Michael Kölle, Jonas Nüßlein and Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Abstract: In the realm of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), prevailing approaches exhibit shortcomings in aligning with human learning, robustness, and scalability. Addressing this, we introduce ClusterComm, a fully decentralized MARL framework where agents communicate discretely without a central control unit. ClusterComm utilizes Mini-Batch-K-Means clustering on the last hidden layer’s activations of an agent’s policy network, translating them into discrete messages. This approach outperforms no communication and competes favorably with unbounded, continuous communication and hence poses a simple yet effective strategy for enhancing collaborative task-solving in MARL.
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Paper Nr: 214
Title:

Scheduling and Negotiation Method for Double Synchronized Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery Problem
Authors:

Yuki Miyashita and Toshiharu Sugawara
Abstract: We propose a multi-agent scheduling and negotiation method for pickup and delivery tasks, each of which requires two synchronizations between heterogeneous agents. Real-world applications of multi-agent systems often require synchronous cooperation at specific times while resolving conflicts between agents. Iterative multi-agent path-finding problem has recently received much attention, which is called multi-agent pickup and delivery (MAPD) problem. In the MAPD problem, agents move to the pickup locations, load materials, and deliver them to their respective unloading locations, by repeatedly assigning new tasks to agents consecutively. Our target is a multi-agent pickup and delivery (MAPD) problem in a multi-story building/warehouse, and thus, a carrier agent requires synchronizations when loading and unloading materials in elevators. We call this problem a double synchronized MAPD (DSMAPD). To our knowledge, the current studies in MAPD have rarely considered such complicated tasks with synchronizations. Our proposed method attempts to reduce the unnecessary free time to improve the efficiency and agents’ operating time without causing collisions and disturbing already agreed-upon synchronizations. The experiments show that our method can outperform naive methods for completing DSMAPD problem instances with reasonable planning and scheduling time.
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Paper Nr: 256
Title:

Better Spacial Hashing with Linear Memory Usage and Parallelism
Authors:

Mykola Zhyhallo and Bożena Woźna-Szcześniak
Abstract: Spatial hashing is an efficient approach for performing proximity queries on objects in collision detection, crowd simulations, and navigation in 3D space. It can also be used to enhance other proximity-related tasks, particularly in virtual realities. This paper describes a fast approach for creating a 1D hash table that handles proximity maps with fixed-size vectors and pivots. Because it allows for linear memory iteration and quick proximity detection, this method is suitable for reaching interactive frame rates with a high number of simulating objects. The technique we propose outperforms previous algorithms based on fixed-size vectors and pivots. Furthermore, our algorithm significantly reduces the memory usage of the pivots table, resulting in decreased dependency on the size of the scene. This improvement allows for more efficient memory utilization, irrespective of the scene’s dimensions.
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Paper Nr: 285
Title:

Be Persuasive! Automatic Transformation of Virtual Agent's Head and Facial Behavior
Authors:

Afef Cherni, Roxane Bertrand and Magalie Ochs
Abstract: The persuasiveness of a virtual agent refers to its ability to influence, persuade, or motivate users to take specific actions or adopt certain attitudes or beliefs. Virtual agents can use its multimodal capabilities, including non-verbal cues to enhance their persuasiveness. In this paper, we present a new tool called THRUST (from neuTral Human face to peRsUaSive virTual face) to automatically generate the head movements and facial expressions of a persuasive virtual character. This tool is based on a machine learning approach from a human videos corpus to identify the non-verbal persuasive cues. A convolution-based model then transforms neutral non-verbal behavior to a persuasive non-verbal behavior simulated on a virtual face. Videos generated by the tool have been evaluated through a subjective perceptive study with about 90 participants. The results show that the virtual agent’s head and facial behaviors generated by the THRUST tool are perceived as persuasive, thus validating the proposed approach.
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Paper Nr: 306
Title:

Adapted Conflict Detection for Conflict Based Search
Authors:

Avgi Kollakidou and Leon Bodenhagen
Abstract: Mobile robots are increasingly deployed in various applications, including autonomous vehicles and logistics. Conflict-Based Search (CBS) is a promising approach for Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF), but has limitations when applied to real-world scenarios. This paper explores the challenges of adapting CBS to real-world mobile robotics, focusing on additional conflicts caused by imperfect navigation. We propose an Adaptive Conflict Detection (ACD) approach that proactively identifies conflicts within a rolling time window, making CBS more suitable for real-world applications. Both virtual and real robots are used to evaluate the importance of an adaptation to CBS if adapted to real scenarios. Experimental results show that ACD outperforms traditional CBS when penalties for conflict resolution are applied, demonstrating its potential for improved performance and reliability in practical multi-agent path planning applications.
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Paper Nr: 338
Title:

Driving Towards a Sustainable Future: A Multi-Layered Agent-Based Digital Twin Approach for Rural Areas
Authors:

Stephanie C. Rodermund, Annegret Janzso, Ye Eun Bae, Anna Kravets, Alexander Schewerda, Jan Ole Berndt and Ingo J. Timm
Abstract: The production of CO2, a major contributor to global emissions, is significantly caused by human activities, with transportation accounting for approximately 25% of worldwide emissions. Fostering pro-environmental behaviors (PEB) is vital for achieving emission reduction. Individual decision-making to adopt PEBs is complex, influenced by personal characteristics, situational factors, and externally sourced information. This position paper introduces a conceptual framework for a multi-layered agent-based Digital Twin (DT) designed to facilitate experimentation with various scenarios and intervention approaches promoting PEB among residents in rural regions. As a use case, we outline how to apply the DT to a specific rural area in Germany.
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Paper Nr: 348
Title:

DriveToGæther: A Turnkey Collaborative Robotic Event Platform
Authors:

Florence Dupin de Saint-Cyr, Nicolas Y. Pepin, Julien Vianey, Nassim Mokhtari, Philippe Morignot, Anne-Gwenn Bosser and Liana Ermakova
Abstract: This paper reports the organization of an event that enabled experts as well as non-specialists to practice Artificial Intelligence on robots, with the goal to enforce human-AI cooperation. The end aim of this paper is to make the material and virtual platform built for the event reusable by as many people as possible, so that the event can be reproduced and can give rise to new discoveries or to the production of new data sets and benchmarks. The underlying purpose is to de-demonize AI and to foster group work around a fun, rewarding and caring project.
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Paper Nr: 359
Title:

Unmasking the Giant: A Comprehensive Evaluation of ChatGPT’s Proficiency in Coding Algorithms and Data Structures
Authors:

Sayed E. Arefin, Tasnia A. Heya, Hasan Al-Qudah, Ynes Ineza and Abdul Serwadda
Abstract: We conduct an extensive analysis of ChatGPT, a standout Large Language Model (LLM), particularly in coding within the Python language, focusing on data structures and algorithms. We assess ChatGPT’s ability to accurately solve coding problems, its code quality, and the nature of run-time errors. Additionally, we examine how ChatGPT’s code performs when it executes but doesn’t solve the problem, identifying error patterns. We also explore whether ChatGPT has memorized training data through a structured experiment. Comparing with human performance where possible, our study encompasses both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models, various subtopics within the main areas, and problems of different complexities.
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Paper Nr: 363
Title:

Multi-Agent Based Framework for Cooperative Traffic Management in C-ITS System
Authors:

Ameni Aloui, Hela Hachicha and Ezzeddine Zagrouba
Abstract: The continual growth in road traffic poses significant challenges to effective traffic management, necessitating innovative solutions such as Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS). This paper introduces a novel multi-agent based model designed to address road traffic management in C-ITS systems. Our approach aims to reduce congestion and enhance driver decision-making by leveraging dynamic communication and information exchange between vehicles and infrastructure. Our multi-agent system is intricately designed to play specific roles in managing traffic flow. Through real-time execution using a C-ITS road safety case study focused on warning accidents, we evaluate the performance of our architecture through key metrics including mean travel time and mean speed in the C-ITS system. The innovative aspects of our approach lie in the integration of multi-agent systems in such a system, providing a significant advancement in the field of C-ITS road traffic management. By detailing the instantiation of our system and emphasizing concrete services, we contribute to the broader goal of improving road safety and traffic efficiency in urban environments.
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Paper Nr: 369
Title:

An Investigation of Distributed Constraint Optimization with Non-Responding Agents Toward Real-Time Solution Method on Practical Messaging Platforms
Authors:

Toshihiro Matsui
Abstract: Distributed constraint optimization problems have been studied as the bases of decentralized resource allocation and decision making on multiagent systems. The studies address constraint optimization problems distributed on multiple agents and decentralized solution methods. A number of types of solution methods based on different optimization techniques have been proposed, and various applications have been investigated, including resource allocation for sensor networks and power grids, and collaboration for meeting scheduling and disaster responses. One issue with implementation is the low communication quality in some cases of actual devices. A recent study addressed the delay and loss of messages in local search methods. On the other hand, opportunities exist for considering further practical implementation techniques. For example, in real-time systems, a solution process might be required to complete an optimization cycle even if several agents do not respond temporally. In this paper, we investigate fundamental implementation techniques toward distributed constraint optimization methods on a message-oriented communication platform based on the publish/subscribe model, which is generally employed for IoT devices and robot systems. In our first study, we address the deterministic local search method on the low QoS settings of communication environments with message loss, where the solution method must continue with temporally missing agents. We experimentally evaluate the influence of several approaches to handle temporally non-responding agents in the executing solution processes.
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Paper Nr: 374
Title:

Experimenting with Planning and Reasoning in Ad Hoc Teamwork Environments with Large Language Models
Authors:

Polyana D. Costa, Pedro D. Santos, José C. Boaro, Daniel S. Moraes, Júlio C. Duarte and Sergio Colcher
Abstract: Ad Hoc Teamwork environments are dynamic spaces where agents engage in activities, make decisions, and collaborate with teammates without prior coordination or complete knowledge of tasks. To effectively operate in such an environment, an ad hoc agent must be equipped with robust reasoning and planning mechanisms. Since Large Language Models (LLMs) are known for their generalization abilities, this study showcases their application in ad hoc scenarios. By modeling the robot’s actions using LangChain Tools, building a semantic map, and capturing human communication interactions, we tested the LLM reasoning capabilities in three simulated scenarios involving humans and a robot. In each case, after providing contextual information, we build a meta-prompt with the question: ‘How can the Robot help?’. By conducting these tests, this study highlighted the LLM’s ability to infer tasks and craft action plans even in the absence of explicit verbal commands.
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Paper Nr: 18
Title:

Twisted Strategy Bolsters Minority Cooperator Populations
Authors:

Akihiro Takahara and Tomoko Sakiyama
Abstract: Defectors tend to survive in the spatial prisoner’s dilemma. Thus, many studies have sought to keep the cooperator alive. Here, we aimed to enhance the survival of the cooperator by considering the memory length in the spatial prisoner’s dilemma. In the proposed model, all players are assigned a memory length. Based on this memory length, players updated their strategies to those that were harder to choose in the past only when the score of each neighbor with the same strategy was high. This above strategy update rule therefore alleviates a disadvantageous situation for the player. In this paper, we focused on two cases where the cooperators were initially in the minority and observed their evolution over time. The results showed that the model eventually strives to maintain the cooperator population even when it was initially low.
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Paper Nr: 28
Title:

AutoNav in C-L-U-E: A Baseline Autonomous Software Stack for Autonomous Navigation in Closed Low-Speed Unstructured Environments
Authors:

Mohamed Sabry, Amr Farag, Bassem Magued, Ahmed Mazhr, Amr El Mougy and Slim Abdennadher
Abstract: The development of Autonomous systems modules has been growing exponentially within the past few years with various complex approaches. Most of these systems have some restrictions or dependencies on numerous inputs. There are two main categories of these systems, Highway and Urban Road-Vehicle autonomous systems, and short-distance autonomous platforms. The short-distance category includes minipods and golfcars that operate in closed environments such as residential compounds or university campuses. Various challenges have been identified in both categories. A challenge example for Highways / Urban areas is controlling the vehicle’s motion on high and moderate speeds. However, for closed campuses, the challenge is mainly in maneuvering around high density pedestrians moving with low speeds and being able to avoid low pavements and obstacles that may damage the platform, such as potholes. For this matter and given the increasing complexity of modules-in-development, this paper proposes a low-complexity baseline map-less autonomous software stack with a perception module capable of navigating closed campuses within unstructured environments. The system is a simple one that requires 1 - 2 LiDARs as well as an input route to follow, which is inserted by the user from offline Open Street Maps (OSM) data. The system runs fully on-board on a consumer grade PC without the need for internet connectivity and has been tested successfully in various scenarios on campus at the German University in Cairo (GUC), Egypt. The tests included pedestrian and obstacle avoidance as well as emergency stopping with the capability of resuming and the following the preset global path before departure. The proposed system is based on the golf-car platform at the GUC.
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Paper Nr: 92
Title:

Decentralized Intelligence for Smart Agriculture
Authors:

Pascal F. Faye, Jeanne A. Faye and Mariane Senghor
Abstract: This work proposes a model called AIMS (Agricultural Information and Management System) based on some Machine Learning Algorithm (ML) as CART (Classification And Regression Trees), KNN(K-nearest neighbors) and SVM(Support Vector Machine). It describes both a multi-agent system and Internet Of Things device that ensures data collection and control as well as a data monitoring system via our web platform for decision-making support in a real-world agricultural environments. This for a prompt, effective and sustainable agricultural development. We refer to cases in which agent collaboration is needed for efficient task execution (e. g. data processing and decision making). In our context, dynamics and uncertainty prohibit computation strategies ahead of task execution. Combining methods from Machine Learning (ML), Markov decision processes (MDP) and probability, we introduce an auto-stabilizing coordination mechanism.
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Paper Nr: 93
Title:

Sweeping-Based Multi-Robot Exploration in an Unknown Environment Using Webots
Authors:

Nirali Sanghvi, Rajdeep Niyogi and Alfredo Milani
Abstract: In this paper, a sweeping algorithm is proposed with the goal of achieving maximal coverage while minimizing the overlapping areas, in an unknown environment. Two scenarios are considered: one in which the robots do not communicate with one another, and another in which the robots are allowed to communicate with one another. The simulations are performed on Webots, a multi-robot simulator, varying various parameters like environment size, obstacles, and number of robots and their positions. The coverage obtained with the proposed approach is 89-98%. When the robots are allowed to communicate, there is a reduction in exploration time that ranges from a minimum of 33% to a maximum of 68%.
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Paper Nr: 114
Title:

Improving the Sum-of-Cost Methods for Reduction-Based Multi-Agent Pathfinding Solvers
Authors:

Roland Kaminski, Torsten Schaub, Klaus Strauch and Jiří Švancara
Abstract: Multi-agent pathfinding is the task of guiding a group of agents through a shared environment while preventing collisions. This problem is highly relevant in various real-life scenarios, such as warehousing, robotics, navigation, and computer games. Depending on the context in which the problem is applied, we may have specific criteria for the quality of a solution, expressed as a cost function. The most common cost functions are the makespan and sum-of-cost. Minimizing either of them is computationally challenging, leading to the development of numerous approaches for solving multi-agent pathfinding. In this paper, we explore reduction-based solving under the sum-of-cost objective. We introduce a reduction to answer set programming (ASP) using two existing approaches for sum-of-cost minimization, originally introduced for a reduction to Boolean satisfiability (SAT). We propose several enhancements and use the Clingo ASP system to implement them. Experiments show that these enhancements significantly improve performance. Particularly, the performance on larger maps increases in comparison to the original variants.
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Paper Nr: 157
Title:

The Role of Stop-Loss Orders in Market Efficiency and Stability: An Agent-Based Study
Authors:

Patrick Liston, Charles Gretton and Artem Lensky
Abstract: Stop-loss orders can have large and ranging effects on the behaviours and outcomes for participants within financial markets. We develop and demonstrate an approach to studying the effect of stop-losses on price dynamics within a financial market. Using our high-fidelity agent-based market simulator that draws on historical limit order book data, we illustrate that the introduction of stop-loss orders leads to volatility, creating the potential for stop-loss cascades that result in large price movements. We study a market containing an agent that is able to trigger such events and profit from them. We indicate that the structure of the stop-loss order book may be used by such an agent to inform trading decisions and to generate volatility within markets for their benefit. Finally we demonstrate how the agents closing strategy effects both the profitability of the agent, as well as the price trajectory of the market.
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Paper Nr: 168
Title:

An On-Board Off-Board Framework for Online Replanning: Applied to UAVs in Urban Environments
Authors:

Timothy Darrah, Jeremy Frank, Marcos Quiñones-Grueiro and Gautam Biswas
Abstract: This paper introduces a novel framework for online replanning using an onboard-offboard architecture for sensing and replanning. The replanning agent is implemented via a genetic algorithm, and several modifications to the genetic algorithm are evaluated. These include fast-start and adaptive properties that pre-seed candidates with partial solutions, as well as dynamic adaptation that tune elitism, crossover, and mutation rates. A population restart mechanism and early stopping mechanism are evaluated as well to assess their effect on solution quality and runtime. Previous work on genetic algorithms for UAV replanning were conducted with short trajectories in a small state space. Our UAV operates in a 56,000 square meter simulated urban environment, with static obstacles and a total of 53 possible waypoints.
Paper Nr: 206
Title:

Assessing Routing Decisions of Search and Rescue Teams in Service of an Artificial Social Intelligence Agent
Authors:

Volkan Ustun, Ronit Jorvekar, Nikolos Gurney, David Pynadath and Yunzhe Wang
Abstract: In the context of Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) missions, efficient routing performance is of paramount importance for the success of a USAR team. Artificial Social Intelligence (ASI) agents could play a crucial role in guiding and interacting with these teams, and an analysis of the routing choices made by USAR teams can offer valuable insights into their overall performance and provide guidance for interventions by ASI agents. This study capitalizes on recent advancements in Graph Neural Networks, transformers, and attention models to harness their capabilities as neural heuristics for rapidly generating near-optimal routes in routing challenges. Specifically, we propose a real-time decision framework to scrutinize and evaluate routing decisions executed by participants during the DARPA ASIST Minecraft USAR Task. This assessment involves comparing the routing decisions made by participants and routes concurrently generated and recommended by neural heuristics employing Graph Neural Networks with attention mechanisms. Furthermore, our investigation delves into the potential of routing decision assessments as informative indicators for an ASI agent, aiding in identifying scenarios necessitating intervention. This research contributes to using quantitative metrics, such as routing efficiency, as meaningful signals for ASI agents to monitor the performance of USAR teams through integrating state-of-the-art AI techniques. Ultimately, this integration could enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of an ASI in guiding search and rescue operations.
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Paper Nr: 222
Title:

A Three-Valued Semantics for Negotiated Situation of Multi-Agent System Based on BATNA and WATNA
Authors:

Yang Song and Ken Satoh
Abstract: Negotiation plays a crucial role in the dispute resolution systems. In the negotiation, the agents usually need to compromise with each other because their preferences are different. To provide the best or acceptable suggestion in the negotiation, BATNA (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement) and WATNA (Worst Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement) can be a method to express the preference of each agent. In this paper, our aim is to formalize the negotiated situations of multi-agent system in a logical method based on BATNA and WATNA. We consider each given suggestion as a possible world in modal logic, and provide a 3-valued valuation based on Gödel logic to judge whether a suggestion is over the BATNA, below the WATNA, or between the BATNA and WATNA of each agent, which is to show whether the suggestion is acceptable, rejectable or undecided to the agent. Moreover, by using the modal operator we can check whether there exists a best or acceptable suggestion for all agents in a negotiated situation.
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Paper Nr: 234
Title:

Investigation of Heuristics for PIBT Solving Continuous MAPF Problem in Narrow Warehouse
Authors:

Toshihiro Matsui
Abstract: We address the heuristics based on map structures in a solution method for continuous multiagent path finding problems particularly in the case of relatively narrow warehouse maps. The multiagent pathfinding problem has been studied as a fundamental problem in multiagent systems, and the lifelong/continuous multiagent pickup-and-delivery problem is a major extension of it that represents the tasks performed by robot carriers in automated warehouses. While basic methods of multiagent pathfinding are generally aimed at resolving collisions among agents using precisely computed/reserved paths or locally performed resolving algorithms, there might also be opportunities to employ information of maps and traffic for the heuristics of solution methods. As such an investigation, we focus on the case of multiagent pickup-and-delivery problems in narrow warehouse environments and the solution method called Priority Inheritance with Backtracking (PIBT), which is not based on the reservation of paths and is applicable to continuous problems within very narrow maps. We experimentally investigate the effect of map settings and additional heuristics based on the structures of maps.
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Paper Nr: 317
Title:

Advancements in Traffic Simulations with multiMATSim’s Distributed Framework
Authors:

Sara Moukir, Miwako Tsuji, Nahid Emad, Mitsuhisa Sato and Stephane Baudelocq
Abstract: In an era characterized by massive volumes of data, the demand for advanced road traffic simulators has reached an even greater scale. In response to this call, we propose an approach applied to MATSim, specifically called multiMATSim. Beyond its tailor-made implementation in MATSim, this innovative approach is designed with generic intent, aiming for adaptability to a variety of multi-agent traffic simulators. Its strength lies in its blend of versatility and adaptability. Fortified by a multi-level parallelism and fault-tolerant framework, multiMATSim demonstrates promising scalability across diverse computing architectures. The results of our experiments on two parallel architectures based on x86 and ARM processors systematically underline the superiority of multiMATSim over MATSim. This especially in load scaling scenarios. We highlight the generality of the multiMATSim concept and its applicability to other road traffic simulators. We will also see how the proposed approach can contribute to the optimization of multi-agent road traffic simulators and, impact the simulation time thanks to its intrinsic parallelism.
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Paper Nr: 342
Title:

Constraints Enabled Autonomous Agent Marketplace: Discovery and Matchmaking
Authors:

Debmalya Biswas
Abstract: The recent advances in Generative AI have renewed the discussion around Auto-GPT, a form of autonomous agent that can execute complex tasks, e.g., make a sale, plan a trip, etc. We focus on the discovery aspect of agents, i.e., identifying the agent(s) capable of executing a given task. This implies that there exists a marketplace with a registry of agents - with a well-defined description of the agent capabilities and constraints. In this paper, we outline a constraints based model to specify agent services. We show how the constraints of a composite agent can be derived and described in a manner consistent with respect to the constraints of its component agents. Finally, we discuss approximate matchmaking, and show how the notion of bounded inconsistency can be exploited to discover agents more efficiently.
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