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NEC Laboratories America heads to ACL 2026 in San Diego, California, July 2–7, to present accepted papers spanning knowledge updating and memory control in large language models, task-aware cultural alignment, uncertainty-aware reasoning, and adaptive chain-of-thought optimization, representing some
Procurement teams lose time and money to inaccurate demand forecasts and manual supplier negotiations. A new framework from NEC Corporation and NEC Laboratories America combines automated negotiation with multimodal AI forecasting to optimize both sides of the procurement process.
Procurement is a key function in supply chain management that involves acquiring goods and services to meet organizational needs. Efficient procurement is crucial for minimizing costs, ensuring timely delivery, and maintaining quality standards. This paper explores the integration of automated negotiation
Most retrieval-augmented generation systems stop at documents, ignoring the relational databases that power finance, healthcare, and research. Our researchers built a rule-driven framework that learns which source to query for each question, delivering better answers at lower computational cost.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on general Question Answering (QA), yet they often struggle in domain-specific scenarios where accurate and up-to-date information is required. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this limitation by enriching LLMs with external
Time series data is ubiquitous across various domains, including manufacturing, finance, and healthcare. High-quality annotations are essential for effectively understanding time series and facilitating downstream tasks. However, obtaining such annotations is challenging, particularly in mission-critical
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at many reasoning tasks but struggle with knowledge-intensive queries due to their inability to dynamically access up-to-date or domain-specific information. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising solution, enabling LLMs to ground their responses
Automatically extracting workflows as procedural graphs from natural language is promising yet underexplored, demanding both structural validity and logical alignment. While recent large language models (LLMs) show potential for procedural graph extraction, they often produce ill-formed structures or
Uncovering causal structures from observational data is crucial for understanding complex systems and making informed decisions. While reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in identifying these structures in the form of a directed acyclic graph (DAG), existing methods often lack efficiency, making
Geological CO2 storage (GCS) involves injecting captured CO2 into deep sub-surface formations to support climate goals. The effective management of GCS relies on adaptive injection planning to dynamically control injection rates and well pressures to balance both storage safety and efficiency. Prior
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is essential for pinpointing the root causes of failures in microservice systems. Traditional data-driven RCA methods are typically limited to offline applications due to high computational demands, and existing online RCA methods handle only single-modal data, overlooking complex
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Claude has significantly increased the presence of AI-generated text in digital communication. This trend has heightened the need for reliable detection methods to distinguish between human-authored and machine-generated
Time series, typically represented as numerical sequences, can also be transformed into images and texts, offering multi-modal views (MMVs) of the same underlying signal. These MMVs can reveal complementary patterns and enable the use of powerful pre-trained large models, such as large vision models
Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising capabilities for tackling complex reasoning tasks, including optimization problems. However, existing methods either rely on prompt engineering, which leads to poor generalization across problem types, or require costly supervised training. We introduce SolverLLM,
Time series analysis provides essential insights for real-world system dynamics and informs downstream decision-making, yet most existing methods often overlook the rich contextual signals present in auxiliary modalities. To bridge this gap, we introduce TimeXL, a multi-modal prediction framework that
Inference scaling methods for LLMs often rely on decomposing problems into steps (or groups of tokens), followed by sampling and selecting the best next steps. However, these steps and their sizes are often predetermined or manually designed based on domain knowledge. We propose dynamic decomposition,
Extreme events frequently occur in real-world time series and often carry significant practical implications. In domains such as climate and healthcare, these events, such as floods, heatwaves, or acute medical episodes, can lead to serious consequences. Accurate forecasting of such events is therefore
Change point detection aims to identify abrupt shifts occurring at multiple points within a data sequence. This task becomes particularly challenging in the online setting, where different types of change can occur, including shifts in both the marginal and joint distributions of the data. In this paper,
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task-agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. However, directly applying LLMs to solve sophisticated problems in specific domains meets many hurdles, caused
Time series analysis has witnessed the inspiring development from traditional autoregressive models, deep learning models, to recent Transformers and Large Language Models (LLMs). Efforts in leveraging vision models for time series analysis have also been made along the way but are less visible to the
Multi-modal time series analysis has recently emerged as a prominent research area, driven by the increasing availability of diverse data modalities, such as text, images, and structured tabular data from real-world sources. However, effective analysis of multi-modal time series is hindered by data heterogeneity,
Anomaly detection is essential for identifying unusual system behaviors and has wide-ranging applications, from fraud detection to system monitoring. In web servers, anomalies are typically detected using two types of data: metrics (numerical indicators of performance) and logs (records of system events).
Large language models (LLMs) integrated into multi-step agent systems enable complex decision-making processes across various applications. However, their outputs often lack reliability, making uncertainty estimation crucial. Existing uncertainty estimation methods primarily focus on final-step outputs,
Causal discovery is an imperative foundation for decision-making across domains, such as smart health, AI for drug discovery and AIOps. Traditional statistical causal discovery methods, while well-established, predominantly rely on observational data and often overlook the semantic cues inherent in cause-and-effect
Symmetry in the parameter space of deep neural networks (DNNs) has proven beneficial for various deep learning applications. A well-known example is the permutation symmetry in Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), where permuting the rows of weight matrices in one layer and applying the inverse permutation
The recent proliferation of photorealistic images created by generative models has sparked both excitement and concern, as these images are increasingly indistinguishable from real ones to the human eye. While offering new creative and commercial possibilities, the potential for misuse, such as in misinformation
The Out-of-Distribution (OOD) problem in graph-structured data is becoming increasingly important in various areas of research and applications, including social network recommendation [36], protein function detection [9, 21], etc. Furthermore, owing to the inherent multi-label properties of nodes, multi-label
Prompt tuning is highly effective in efficiently extracting knowledge from foundation models, encompassing both language, vision, and vision-language models. However, the efficacy of employing fixed soft prompts with a predetermined position for concatenation with inputs for all instances, irrespective
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit potential artificial generic intelligence recently, however, their usage is costly with high response latency. Given mixed LLMs with their own strengths and weaknesses, LLM routing aims to identify the most suitable model for each query in the stream to maximize response
Inference scaling methods often rely on decomposing problems into steps, followed by sampling and selecting the best next steps. However, these steps and their sizes are typically fixed or depend on domain knowledge. We propose dynamic decomposition, a method that adaptively and automatically breaks
Inference scaling methods often rely on decomposing problems into steps, followed by sampling and selecting the best next steps. However, these steps and their sizes are typically fixed or depend on domain knowledge. We propose dynamic decomposition, a method that adaptively and automatically breaks
Recent research has developed a number of eXplainable AI (XAI) techniques, such as gradient-based approaches, input perturbation-base methods, and black-box explanation methods. While these XAI techniques can extract meaningful insights from deep learning models, how to properly evaluate them remains
The advent of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the field of text generation, producing outputs that closely mimic human-like writing. Although academic and industrial institutions have developed detectors to prevent the malicious usage of LLM-generated texts, other research has doubt about
We frame code generation as a black-box optimization problem within the code space and demonstrate how optimization-inspired techniques can enhance inference scaling. Based on this perspective, we propose SCATTERED FOREST SEARCH (SFS), a novel approach that improves solution diversity and better exploits
Visual Language Models (VLMs) like GPT-4V have broadened the scope of LLM applications, yet they face significant challenges in accurately processing visual details, particularly in scientific diagrams. This paper explores the necessity of meticulous visual detail collection and region decomposition
Real-world time series data often require analysis or interpretation from domain experts. Some tasks, like time series question answering, involve both time series and natural language questions, posing challenges for single-modality language models to understand their interaction. To this end, we present
Time series data is essential in various applications, including climate modeling, healthcare monitoring, and financial analytics. Understanding the contextual information associated with real-world time series data is often essential for accurate and reliable event predictions. In this paper, we introduce
The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is widely used in many applications such as smart city, transportation, healthcare, and environment monitoring. A key task of IoT maintenance is to analyze the abnormal sensor records and generate incident report. Traditionally, domain experts engage in such labor intensive
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized text generation, producing outputs that closely mimic human writing. This blurring of lines between machine- and human-written text presents new challenges in distinguishing one from the other a task further complicated by the frequent
The advent of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the field of natural language processing, yet they might be attacked to produce harmful content. Despite efforts to ethically align LLMs, these are often fragile and can be circumvented by jailbreaking attacks through optimized or manual adversarial
The burgeoning capabilities of advanced large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have led to an increase in synthetic content generation with implications across a variety of sectors, including media, cybersecurity, public discourse, and education. As such, the ability to detect LLMs-generated content
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved exceptional capabilities in open generation across various domains, yet they encounter difficulties with tasks that require intensive knowledge. To address these challenges, methods for integrating knowledge have been developed, which augment LLMs with domain-specific
The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven considerable interest in fine-tuning them with domain-specific data to create specialized language models. Nevertheless, such domain-specific fine-tuning data often contains contextually sensitive personally identifiable information (PII).
Learning to perform physical tasks is ubiquitous yet challenging without expert guidance. While Augmented Reality (AR) has been adopted to overlay instructions directly onto the physical context, the natural authoring of such content remains unexplored. To address this, we developed WizARd and Apprentice,
Achieving carbon neutrality within industrial operations has become increasingly imperative for sustainable development. It is both a significant challenge and a key opportunity for operational optimization in industry 4.0. In recent years, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based methods offer promising
Though Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable open-generation capabilities across diverse domains, they struggle with knowledge-intensive tasks. To alleviate this issue, knowledge integration methods have been proposed to enhance LLMs with domain-specific knowledge graphs using external modules.
In the context of long-tail classification on graphs, the vast majority of existing work primarily revolves around the development of model debiasing strategies, intending to mitigate class imbalances and enhance the overall performance. Despite the notable success, there is very limited literature that
Time series domain adaptation stands as a pivotal and intricate challenge with diverse applications, including but not limited to human activity recognition, sleep stage classification, and machine fault diagnosis. Despite the numerous domain adaptation techniques proposed to tackle this complex problem,
Joint entity and relation extraction is a process that identifies entity pairs and their relations using a single model. We focus on the problem of joint extraction in distantly-labeled data,whose labels are generated by aligning entity mentions with the corresponding entity and relation tags using a
Recognizing domain generalization as a commonplace challenge in machine learning, data distribution might progressively evolve across a continuum of sequential domains in practical scenarios. While current methodologies primarily concentrate on bolstering model effectiveness within these new domains,
This paper introduces the retrieval-augmented large language model with Definite Finite Automaton (DFA-RAG), a novel framework designed to enhance the capabilities of conversational agents using large language models (LLMs). Traditional LLMs face challenges in generating regulated and compliant responses
The objective of change point detection is to identify abrupt changes at potentially multiple points within a data sequence. This task is particularly challenging in the online setting where various types of changes can occur, including shifts in both the marginal and joint distributions of the data.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable proficiency across a wide array of NLP tasks. However, the escalation in model size also engenders substantial deployment costs. While few efforts have explored model pruning techniques to reduce the size of LLMs, they mainly center on general or
In-context learning has emerged as a groundbreaking ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) and revolutionized various fields by providing a few task-relevant demonstrations in the prompt. However, trustworthy issues with LLMs response, such as hallucination, have also been actively discussed. Existing
In today’s world, with its complex global supply chains, the difficulties and uncertainties we face offer both challenges and opportunities for making things better, especially in terms of efficiency and sustainability. These challenges grow due to unpredictable events, such as natural disasters, unexpected
Effective root cause analysis (RCA) is vital for swiftly restoring services, minimizing losses, and ensuring the smooth operation and management of complex systems. Previous data-driven RCA methods, particularly those employing causal discovery techniques, have primarily focused on constructing dependency
Large language models (LLMs) have notably enhanced the fluency and diversity of machine-generated text. However, this progress also presents a significant challenge in detecting the origin of a given text, and current research on detection methods lags behind the rapid evolution of LLMs. Conventional
Open Information Extraction (OIE) task aims at extracting structured facts from unstructured text, typically in the form of (subject, relation, object) triples. Despite the potential of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT as a general task solver, they lag behind state-of-the-art (supervised) methods
Modern techniques like contrastive learning have been effectively used in many areas, including computer vision, natural language processing, and graph-structured data. Creating positive examples that assist the model in learning robust and discriminative representations is a crucial stage in contrastive
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are neural models that leverage the dependency structure in graphical data via message passing among the graph nodes. GNNs have emerged as pivotal architectures in analyzing graph-structured data, and their expansive application in sensitive domains requires a comprehensive
Imitation learning, which learns agent policy by mimicking expert demonstration, has shown promising results in many applications such as medical treatment regimes and self-driving vehicles. However, it remains a difficult task to interpret control policies learned by the agent. Difficulties mainly come
Time series domain adaptation stands as a pivotal and intricate challenge with diverse applications, including but not limited to human activity recognition, sleep stage classification, and machine fault diagnosis. Despite the numerous domain adaptation techniques proposed to tackle this complex problem,
Meta-learning enables quick adaptation of machine learning models to new tasks with limited data. While tasks could come from varying distributions in reality, most of the existing meta-learning methods consider both training and testing tasks as from the same uni-component distribution, overlooking
Open-ended Commonsense Reasoning is defined as solving a commonsense question without providing 1) a short list of answer candidates and 2) a pre-defined answer scope. Conventional ways of formulating the commonsense question into a question-answering form or utilizing external knowledge to learn retrieval-based
Logs play a crucial role in system monitoring and debugging by recording valuable system information, including events and status. Although various methods have been proposed to detect anomalies in log sequences, they often overlook the significance of considering relationships among system components,
For example, in machine translation tasks, to achieve bidirectional translation between two languages, the source corpus is often used as the target corpus, which involves the training of two models with opposite directions. The question of which one can adapt most quickly to a domain shift is of significant
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in dealing with graph-structured data that are prevalent in the real world. The core of graph neural networks is the message passing mechanism that aims to generate the embeddings of nodes by aggregating the neighboring node information. However,
Internet-of-things (IoTs) deploy a massive number of sensors to monitor the system and environment. Anomaly detection on sensor data is an important task for IoT maintenance and operation. In real applications, the occurrence of a system-level incident usually involves hundreds of abnormal sensors, making
Internet-of-things (IoTs) deploy a massive number of sensors to monitor the system and environment. Anomaly detection on sensor data is an important task for IoT maintenance and operation. In real applications, the occurrence of a system-level incident usually involves hundreds of abnormal sensors, making
Read AutoTCL: Automated Time Series Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentations publication. Modern techniques like contrastive learning have been effectively used in many areas, including computer vision, natural language processing, and graph-structured data. Creating positive examples that assist
Read FedSkill: Privacy Preserved Interpretable Skill Learning via Imitation publication. Imitation learning that replicates experts’ skills via their demonstrations has shown significant success in various decision-making tasks. However, two critical challenges still hinder the deployment of imitation
The task of root cause analysis (RCA) is to identify the root causes of system faults/failures by analyzing system monitoring data. Efficient RCA can greatly accelerate system failure recovery and mitigate system damages or financial losses. However, previous research has mostly focused on developing
The goal of root cause analysis is to identify the underlying causes of system problems by discovering and analyzing the causal structure from system monitoring data. It is indispensable for maintaining the stability and robustness of large-scale complex systems. Existing methods mainly focus on the
Imitation learning has achieved great success in many sequential decision-making tasks, in which a neural agent is learned by imitating collected human demonstrations. However, existing algorithms typically require a large number of high-quality demonstrations that are difficult and expensive to collect.
With the escalating prevalence of Internet of Things (IoTs) in critical infrastructure, the requirement for efficient and effective anomaly detection solution becomes increasingly important. Unfortunately, most prior research works have largely overlooked to adapt detection criteria for different operational
The recent trend towards Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) has garnered significant attention as it allows for the training of models that are tailored to each client while maintaining data privacy. However, current PFL techniques primarily focus on modeling the conditional distribution heterogeneity
Unsupervised anomaly detection approaches have been widely accepted in applications for industrial systems. Industrial systems often operate with multiple modes since they work for multiple purposes or under different conditions. In order to deal with the difficulty of anomaly detection due to multiple
Early event detection aims to detect events even before the event is complete. However, most of the existing methods focus on an event with a single label but fail to be applied to cases with multiple labels. Another non-negligible issue for early event detection is a prediction with overconfidence due
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. The great promise of LLMs as general task solvers motivated people to extend their functionality largely beyond
Imitation learning that mimics experts’ skills from their demonstrations has shown great success in discovering dynamic treatment regimes, i.e., the optimal decision rules to treat an individual patient based on related evolving treatment and covariate history. Existing imitation learning methods,
It has been demonstrated that prompt tuning is highly effective in efficiently eliciting knowledge from language models (LMs). However, the prompt tuning still lags behind fine tuning, especially when the LMs are small. P tuning v2 (Liu et al., 2021b) makes it comparable with finetuning by adding continuous
Text summarization has been a crucial problem in natural language processing (NLP) for several decades. It aims to condense lengthy documents into shorter versions while retaining the most critical information. Various methods have been proposed for text summarization, including extractive and abstractive
Various contrastive learning approaches have been proposed in recent years and have achieved significant empirical success. While effective and prevalent, contrastive learning has been less explored for time series data. A key component of contrastive learning is to select appropriate augmentations,
Although many anomaly detection approaches have been developed for multivariate time series data, limited effort has been made in federated settings in which multivariate time series data are heterogeneously distributed among different edge devices while data sharing is prohibited. In this paper, we
Graph Neural Network (GNN), as a powerful representation learning model on graph data, attracts much attention across various disciplines. However, recent studies show that GNN is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. How to make GNN more robust? What are the key vulnerabilities in GNN? How to address the
Analogical reasoning is the process of discovering and mapping correspondences from a target subject to a base subject. As the most well-known computational method of analogical reasoning, Structure-Mapping Theory (SMT) abstracts both target and base subjects into relational graphs and forms the cognitive
Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) which collaboratively trains a federated model while considering local clients under privacy constraints has attracted much attention. Despite its popularity, it has been observed that existing PFL approaches result in sub-optimal solutions when the joint distribution
As a key component of e-commerce computing, product representation learning (PRL) provides benefits for a variety of applications, including product matching, search, and categorization. The existing PRL approaches have poor language understanding ability due to their inability to capture contextualized
Internet of things (IoT) applications deploy massive number of sensors to monitor the system and environment. Anomaly detection on streaming sensor data is an important task for IoT maintenance and operation. However, there are two major challenges for anomaly detection in real IoT applications: (1)
Multi-source Inductive Knowledge Graph Transfer Large-scale information systems, such as knowledge graphs (KGs), enterprise system networks, often exhibit dynamic and complex activities. Recent research has shown that formalizing these information systems as graphs can effectively characterize the entities
The applications of Internet-of-things (IoT) deploy a massive number of sensors to monitor the system and environment. Anomaly detection on streaming sensor data is an important task for IoT maintenance and operation. In real IoT applications, many sensors report categorical values rather than numerical
It is critical and important to detect anomalies in event sequences, which becomes widely available in many application domains. Indeed, various efforts have been made to capture abnormal patterns from event sequences through sequential pattern analysis or event representation learning. However, existing
Promising progress has been made toward learning efficient time series representations in recent years, but the learned representations often lack interpretability and do not encode semantic meanings by the complex interactions of many latent factors. Learning representations that disentangle these latent
Sound Event Early Detection (SEED) is an essential task in recognizing the acoustic environments and soundscapes. However, most of the existing methods focus on the offline sound event detection, which suffers from the over-confidence issue of early-stage event detection and usually yield unreliable
Learning fine-grained embeddings is essential for extending the generalizability of models pre-trained on “coarse” labels (e.g., animals). It is crucial to fields for which fine-grained labeling (e.g., breeds of animals) is expensive, but fine-grained prediction is desirable, such as medicine. The dilemma
We target the task of cross-lingual Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) in the direct zero-shot setting, by incorporating syntactic features from Universal Dependencies (UD), and the key features we use are the syntactic relations within each sentence. While previous work has demonstrated effective syntax-guided
In this paper, we propose an ordered time series classification framework that is robust against missing classes in the training data, i.e., during testing we can prescribe classes that are missing during training. This framework relies on two main components: (1) our newly proposed ordinal quadruplet
Using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to recover expert policies via imitation has been found to be promising in a wide range of applications. However, it remains a difficult task to interpret the control policy learned by the agent. Difficulties mainly come from two aspects: 1) agents in DRL are usually
InfoGCL: Information-Aware Graph Contrastive Learning Various graph contrastive learning models have been proposed to improve the performance of tasks on graph datasets in recent years. While effective and prevalent, these models are usually carefully customized. In particular, despite all recent work
Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation is an emerging area of research on location-based social networks to analyze user behaviors and contextual check-in information. For this problem, existing approaches, with shallow or deep architectures, have two major drawbacks. First, for these approaches, the
Recent multilingual pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable zero-shot performance, where the model is only finetuned on one source language and directly evaluated on target languages. In this work, we propose a self-learning framework that further utilizes unlabeled data of target languages,
Compliments and concerns in reviews are valuable for understanding users’ shopping interests and their opinions with respect to specific aspects of certain items. Existing review-based recommenders favor large and complex language encoders that can only learn latent and uninterpretable text representations.
In many high-stakes applications of machine learning models, outputting only predictions or providing statistical confidence is usually insufficient to gain trust from end users, who often prefer a transparent reasoning paradigm. Despite the recent encouraging developments on deep networks for sequential
Detecting anomalies in dynamic graphs is a vital task, with numerous practical applications in areas such as security, finance, and social media. Existing network embedding based methods have mostly focused on learning good node representations, whereas largely ignoring the subgraph structural changes
Detecting abnormal activities in real-world surveillance videos is an important yet challenging task as the prior knowledge about video anomalies is usually limited or unavailable. Despite that many approaches have been developed to resolve this problem, few of them can capture the normal spatio-temporal
Motivated by the success of pre-trained language models such as BERT in a broad range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, recent research efforts have been made for adapting these models for different application domains. Along this line, existing domain-oriented models have primarily followed
Discrete event sequences are ubiquitous, such as an ordered event series of process interactions in Information and Communication Technology systems. Recent years have witnessed increasing efforts in detecting anomalies with discrete event sequences. However, it remains an extremely difficult task due
Many users implicitly assume that software can only be exploited after it is installed. However, recent supply-chain attacks demonstrate that application integrity must be ensured during installation itself. We introduce SIGL, a new tool for detecting malicious behavior during software installation.
Imitation learning has been proved to be effective in mimicking experts’ behaviors from their demonstrations without access to explicit reward signals. Meanwhile, complex tasks, e.g., dynamic treatment regimes for patients with comorbidities, often suggest significant variability in expert demonstrations
We present FACESEC, a framework for fine-grained robustness evaluation of face recognition systems. FACESEC evaluation is performed along four dimensions of adversarial modeling: the nature of perturbation (e.g., pixel-level or face accessories), the attacker’s system knowledge (about training data
Anomaly detection is an important data mining task with numerous applications, such as intrusion detection, credit card fraud detection, and video surveillance. However, given a specific complicated task with complicated data, the process of building an effective deep learning-based system for anomaly
Measuring document similarity plays an important role in natural language processing tasks. Most existing document similarity approaches suffer from the information gap caused by context and vocabulary mismatches when comparing varying-length texts. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised concept representation
Prognostics or early detection of incipient faults by leveraging the monitoring time series data in complex systems is valuable to automatic system management and predictive maintenance. However, this task is challenging. First, learning the multi-dimensional heterogeneous time series data with various
Outlier detection is an important data mining task with numerous applications such as intrusion detection, credit card fraud detection, and video surveillance. However, given a specific task with complex data, the process of building an effective deep learning based system for outlier detection still
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown to be powerful tools for graph analytics. The key idea is to recursively propagate and aggregate information along the edges of the given graph. Despite their success, however, the existing GNNs are usually sensitive to the quality of the input graph. Real-world
We consider the models of deep multi-task learning with recurrent architectures that exploit regularities across tasks to improve the performance of multiple sequence processing tasks jointly. Most existing architectures are painstakingly customized to learn task relationships for different problems,
Forecasting on Sparse Multivariate Time Series Forecasting on sparse multivariate time series (MTS) aims to model the predictors of future values of time series given their incomplete past, which is important for many emerging applications. However, most existing methods process MTS’s individually,
Despite recent progress in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), explaining predictions made by GNNs remains a challenging open problem. The leading method independently addresses the local explanations (i.e., important subgraph structure and node features) to interpret why a GNN model makes the prediction for
Recent advances in causal analysis can accelerate incident response time, but only after a causal graph of the attack has been constructed. Unfortunately, existing causal graph generation techniques are mainly offline and may take hours or days to respond to investigator queries, creating greater opportunity
Accurate air turbulence forecasting can help airlines avoid hazardous turbulence, guide the routes that keep passengers safe, maximize efficiency, and reduce costs. Traditional turbulence forecasting approaches heavily rely on painstakingly customized turbulence indexes, which are less effective in dynamic
The modern Internet has witnessed the proliferation of web applications that play a crucial role in the branding process among enterprises. Web applications provide a communication channel between potential customers and business products. However, web applications are also targeted by attackers due
Deep learning systems on the cloud are increasingly targeted by attacks that attempt to steal sensitive data. Intel SGX has been proven effective to protect the confidentiality and integrity of such data during computation. However, state-of-the-art SGX systems still suffer from substantial performance
Anomaly detection has been widely applied in modern data-driven security applications to detect abnormal events/entities that deviate from the majority. However, less work has been done in terms of detecting suspicious event sequences/paths, which are better discriminators than single events/entities
Node classification in temporal graphs aims to predict node labels based on historical observations. In real-world applications, temporal graphs are complex with both graph topology and node attributes evolving rapidly, which poses a high overfitting risk to existing graph learning approaches. In this
Graph representation learning serves as the core of important prediction tasks, ranging from product recommendation to fraud detection. Reallife graphs usually have complex information in the local neighborhood, where each node is described by a rich set of features and connects to dozens or even hundreds
Efficient audio scene classification is essential for smart sensing platforms such as robots, medical monitoring, surveillance, or autonomous vehicles. We propose a retrieval-based scene classification architecture that combines recurrent neural networks and attention to compute embeddings for short
Remaining Useful Life (RUL) estimation is a key element in Predictive maintenance. System agnostic approaches which just utilize sensor and operational time series have gained popularity due to its ease of implementation. Due to the nature of measurement or degradation mechanisms, its accurate estimation
Inductive and unsupervised graph learning is a critical technique for predictive or information retrieval tasks where label information is difficult to obtain. It is also challenging to make graph learning inductive and unsupervised at the same time, as learning processes guided by reconstruction error
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have shown to be a powerful tool for analyzing graph-structured data. Most of previous GCN methods focus on learning a good node representation by aggregating the representations of neighboring nodes, whereas largely ignoring the edge information. Although few recent
Recent developments in discovering dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs) have heightened the importance of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) which are used to recover the doctor’s treatment policies. However, existing DRL-based methods expose the following limitations: 1) supervised methods based on behavior
While backtracking analysis has been successful in assisting the investigation of complex security attacks, it faces a critical dependency explosion problem. To address this problem, security analysts currently need to tune backtracking analysis manually with different case-specific heuristics. However,
To subvert recent advances in perimeter and host security, the attacker community has developed and employed various attack vectors to make malware much more stealthy than before to penetrate the target system and prolong its presence. The advanced malware, or stealthy malware, impersonates or abuses
Recently, recommender systems have been able to emit substantially improved recommendations by leveraging user-provided reviews. Existing methods typically merge all reviews of a given user (item) into a long document, and then process user and item documents in the same manner. In practice, however,
Multivariate time series data are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in varies real-world applications such as smart city, power plant monitoring, wearable devices, etc. Given the current time series segment, how to retrieve similar segments within the historical data in an efficient and effective manner
The problem of learning and forecasting underlying trends in time series data arises in a variety of applications, such as traffic management, energy optimization, etc. In literature, a trend in time series is characterized by the slope and duration, and its prediction is then to forecast the two values
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a critical task in online advertising and marketing. For this problem, existing approaches, with shallow or deep architectures, have three major drawbacks. First, they typically lack persuasive rationales to explain the outcomes of the models. Unexplainable predictions
Question routing (QR) aims at recommending newly posted questions to the potential answerers who are most likely to answer the questions. The existing approaches that learn users’ expertise from their past question-answering activities usually suffer from challenges in two aspects: 1) multi-faceted expertise
System monitoring has recently emerged as an effective way to analyze and counter advanced cyber attacks. The monitoring data records a series of system events and provides a global view of system behaviors in an organization. Querying such data to identify potential system risks and malicious behaviors
Given a network with the labels for a subset of nodes, transductive node classification targets to predict the labels for the remaining nodes in the network. This technique has been used in a variety of applications such as voxel functionality detection in brain network and group label prediction in
Existing representation learning methods based on graph neural networks and their variants rely on the aggregation of neighborhood information, which makes it sensitive to noises in the graph, e.g. erroneous links between nodes, incorrect/missing node features. In this paper, we propose Graph Denoising
Network embedding aims to learn the low-dimensional representations/embeddings of vertices which preserve the structure and inherent properties of the networks. The resultant embeddings are beneficial to downstream tasks such as vertex classification and link prediction. A vast majority of real-world
The need for countering Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks has led to the solutions that ubiquitously monitor system activities in each enterprise host, and perform timely attack investigation over the monitoring data for uncovering the attack sequence. However, existing general-purpose query systems
Information systems have widely been the target of malware attacks. Traditional signature-based malicious program detection algorithms can only detect known malware and are prone to evasion techniques such as binary obfuscation, while behavior-based approaches highly rely on the malware training samples
Node classification in graph-structured data aims to classify the nodes where labels are only available for a subset of nodes. This problem has attracted considerable research efforts in recent years. In real-world applications, both graph topology and node attributes evolve over time. Existing techniques,
We use the term clairvoyant to refer to networks that provide on-demand visibility for any flow at any time. Traditionally, network visibility is achieved by instrumenting and passively monitoring all flows in a network. SDN networks, by design endowed with full visibility, offer another alternative
Program or process is an integral part of almost every IT/OT system. Can we trust the identity/ID (e.g., executable name) of the program? To avoid detection, malware may disguise itself using the ID of a legitimate program, and a system tool (e.g., PowerShell) used by the attackers may have the fake
Co-clustering partitions instances and features simultaneously by leveraging the duality between them, and it often yields impressive performance improvement over traditional clustering algorithms. The recent development in learning deep representations has demonstrated the advantage in extracting effective
Setuid system calls enable critical functions such as user authentications and modular privileged components. Such operations must only be executed after careful validation. However, current systems do not perform rigorous checks, allowing exploitation of privileges through memory corruption vulnerabilities
Modern malware and cyber attacks depend heavily on DNS services to make their campaigns reliable and difficult to track. Monitoring network DNS activities and blocking suspicious domains have been proven an effective technique in countering such attacks. However, recent successful campaigns reveal that
Large enterprises are increasingly relying on threat detection softwares (e.g., Intrusion Detection Systems) to allow them to spot suspicious activities. These softwares generate alerts which must be investigated by cyber analysts to figure out if they are true attacks. Unfortunately, in practice, there
Nowadays, multivariate time series data are increasingly collected in various real-world systems, e.g., power plants, wearable devices, etc. Anomaly detection and diagnosis in multivariate time series refer to identifying abnormal status in certain time steps and pinpointing the root causes. Building
Behavior-based Community Detection: Application to Host Assessment in Enterprise Information Networks Community detection in complex networks is a fundamental problem that attracts much attention across various disciplines. Previous studies have been mostly focusing on external connections between nodes
Given a large number of low-quality heterogeneous categorical alerts collected from an anomaly detection system, how to characterize the complex relationships between different alerts and deliver trustworthy rankings to end users? While existing techniques focus on either mining alert patterns or filtering
Node ranking in temporal networks are often impacted by heterogeneous context from node content, temporal, and structural dimensions. This paper introduces TGNet , a deep-learning framework for node ranking in heterogeneous temporal graphs. TGNet utilizes a variant of Recurrent Neural Network to adapt
Today’s enterprises are exposed to sophisticated attacks, such as Advanced Persistent Threats~(APT) attacks, which usually consist of stealthy multiple steps. To counter these attacks, enterprises often rely on causality analysis on the system activity data collected from a ubiquitous system monitoring
We present DIP, a deep learning-based framework to learn structural properties of the Internet, such as node clustering or distance between nodes. Existing embedding-based approaches use linear algorithms on a single source of data, such as latency or hop count information, to approximate the position
Multivariate time series data are becoming increasingly common in numerous real-world applications, e.g., power plant monitoring, health care, wearable devices, automobiles, etc. As a result, multivariate time series retrieval, i.e., given the current multivariate time series segment, how to obtain its
The problem of network representation learning, also known as network embedding, arises in many machine learning tasks assuming that there exist a small number of variabilities in the vertex representations which can capture the “semantics” of the original network structure. Most existing network embedding
Massive and dynamic networks arise in many practical applications such as social media, security and public health. Given an evolutionary network, it is crucial to detect structural anomalies, such as vertices and edges whose “behaviors” deviate from underlying majority of the network, in a real-time
The latent behavior of an information system that can exhibit extreme events, such as system faults or cyber-attacks, is complex. Recently, the invariant network has shown to be a powerful way of characterizing complex system behaviors. Structures and evolutions of the invariance network, in particular,
Recently, advanced cyber attacks, which consist of a sequence of steps that involve many vulnerabilities and hosts, compromise the security of many well-protected businesses. This has led to solutions that ubiquitously monitor system activities in each host (big data) as a series of events and search
Multi-dimensional Hawkes processes (MHP) has been widely used for modeling temporal events. However, when MHP was used for modeling events with spatio-temporal characteristics, the spatial information was often ignored despite its importance. In this paper, we introduce a framework to exploit MHP for
The need for countering Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks has led to solutions that ubiquitously monitor system activities in each host and perform timely attack investigation over the monitoring data for analyzing attack provenance. However, existing query systems based on relational databases
Administrators of most user-facing systems depend on periodic log data to get an idea of the health and status of production applications. Logs report information, which is crucial to diagnose the root cause of complex problems. In this paper, we present a real-time log analysis system called LogLens
Unsupervised anomaly detection on multi- or high-dimensional data is of great importance in both fundamental machine learning research and industrial applications, for which density estimation lies at the core. Although previous approaches based on dimensionality reduction followed by density estimation
Network embedding aims to learn a low-dimensional vector representation for each node in the social and information networks, with the constraint to preserve network structures. Most existing methods focus on single network embedding, ignoring the relationship between multiple networks. In many real-world
The increasingly sophisticated Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks have become a serious challenge for enterprise IT security. Attack causality analysis, which tracks multi-hop causal relationships between files and processes to diagnose attack provenances and consequences, is the first step towards
