Phishing has been a prevalent cyber threat that manipulates users into revealing sensitive private information through deceptive tactics, designed to masquerade as trustworthy entities. Over the years, proactively detection of phishing URLs (or websites) has been established as an widely-accepted defense approach. In literature, we often find supervised Machine Learning (ML) models with highly competitive performance for detecting phishing websites based on the extracted features from both phishing and benign (i.e., legitimate) websites. However, it is still unclear if these features or indicators are dependent on a particular dataset or they are generalized for overall phishing detection. In this paper, we delve deeper into this issue by analyzing two publicly available phishing URL datasets, where each dataset has its own set of unique and overlapping features related to URL string and website contents. We want to investigate if overlapping features are similar in nature across datasets and how does the model perform when trained on one dataset and tested on the other. We conduct practical experiments and leverage explainable AI (XAI) methods such as SHAP plots to provide insights into different features' contributions in case of phishing detection to answer our primary question, ``Can features for phishing URL detection be trusted across diverse dataset?''. Our case study experiment results show that features for phishing URL detection can often be dataset-dependent and thus may not be trusted across different datasets even though they share same set of feature behaviors.
AI recommender systems are sought for decision support by providing suggestions to operators responsible for making final decisions. However, these systems are typically considered black boxes, and are often presented without any context or insight into the underlying algorithm. As a result, recommender systems can lead to miscalibrated user reliance and decreased situation awareness. Recent work has focused on improving the transparency of recommender systems in various ways such as improving the recommender's analysis and visualization of the figures of merit, providing explanations for the recommender's decision, as well as improving user training or calibrating user trust. In this paper, we introduce an alternative transparency technique of structuring the order in which contextual information and the recommender's decision are shown to the human operator. This technique is designed to improve the operator's situation awareness and therefore the shared situation awareness between the operator and the recommender system. This paper presents the results of a two-phase between-subjects study in which participants and a recommender system jointly make a high-stakes decision. We varied the amount of contextual information the participant had, the assessment technique of the figures of merit, and the reliability of the recommender system. We found that providing contextual information upfront improves the team's shared situation awareness by improving the human decision maker's initial and final judgment, as well as their ability to discern the recommender's error boundary. Additionally, this technique accurately calibrated the human operator's trust in the recommender. This work proposes and validates a way to provide model-agnostic transparency into AI systems that can support the human decision maker and lead to improved team performance.
Graphs are important data representations for describing objects and their relationships, which appear in a wide diversity of real-world scenarios. As one of a critical problem in this area, graph generation considers learning the distributions of given graphs and generating more novel graphs. Owing to their wide range of applications, generative models for graphs, which have a rich history, however, are traditionally hand-crafted and only capable of modeling a few statistical properties of graphs. Recent advances in deep generative models for graph generation is an important step towards improving the fidelity of generated graphs and paves the way for new kinds of applications. This article provides an extensive overview of the literature in the field of deep generative models for graph generation. Firstly, the formal definition of deep generative models for the graph generation and the preliminary knowledge are provided. Secondly, taxonomies of deep generative models for both unconditional and conditional graph generation are proposed respectively; the existing works of each are compared and analyzed. After that, an overview of the evaluation metrics in this specific domain is provided. Finally, the applications that deep graph generation enables are summarized and five promising future research directions are highlighted.
Autonomic computing investigates how systems can achieve (user) specified control outcomes on their own, without the intervention of a human operator. Autonomic computing fundamentals have been substantially influenced by those of control theory for closed and open-loop systems. In practice, complex systems may exhibit a number of concurrent and inter-dependent control loops. Despite research into autonomic models for managing computer resources, ranging from individual resources (e.g., web servers) to a resource ensemble (e.g., multiple resources within a data center), research into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve resource autonomy and performance at scale continues to be a fundamental challenge. The integration of AI/ML to achieve such autonomic and self-management of systems can be achieved at different levels of granularity, from full to human-in-the-loop automation. In this article, leading academics, researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing join to discuss current research and potential future directions for these fields. Further, we discuss challenges and opportunities for leveraging AI and ML in next generation computing for emerging computing paradigms, including cloud, fog, edge, serverless and quantum computing environments.
Music streaming services heavily rely on recommender systems to improve their users' experience, by helping them navigate through a large musical catalog and discover new songs, albums or artists. However, recommending relevant and personalized content to new users, with few to no interactions with the catalog, is challenging. This is commonly referred to as the user cold start problem. In this applied paper, we present the system recently deployed on the music streaming service Deezer to address this problem. The solution leverages a semi-personalized recommendation strategy, based on a deep neural network architecture and on a clustering of users from heterogeneous sources of information. We extensively show the practical impact of this system and its effectiveness at predicting the future musical preferences of cold start users on Deezer, through both offline and online large-scale experiments. Besides, we publicly release our code as well as anonymized usage data from our experiments. We hope that this release of industrial resources will benefit future research on user cold start recommendation.
Current models for event causality identification (ECI) mainly adopt a supervised framework, which heavily rely on labeled data for training. Unfortunately, the scale of current annotated datasets is relatively limited, which cannot provide sufficient support for models to capture useful indicators from causal statements, especially for handing those new, unseen cases. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel approach, shortly named CauSeRL, which leverages external causal statements for event causality identification. First of all, we design a self-supervised framework to learn context-specific causal patterns from external causal statements. Then, we adopt a contrastive transfer strategy to incorporate the learned context-specific causal patterns into the target ECI model. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms previous methods on EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank (+2.0 and +3.4 points on F1 value respectively).
Translational distance-based knowledge graph embedding has shown progressive improvements on the link prediction task, from TransE to the latest state-of-the-art RotatE. However, N-1, 1-N and N-N predictions still remain challenging. In this work, we propose a novel translational distance-based approach for knowledge graph link prediction. The proposed method includes two-folds, first we extend the RotatE from 2D complex domain to high dimension space with orthogonal transforms to model relations for better modeling capacity. Second, the graph context is explicitly modeled via two directed context representations. These context representations are used as part of the distance scoring function to measure the plausibility of the triples during training and inference. The proposed approach effectively improves prediction accuracy on the difficult N-1, 1-N and N-N cases for knowledge graph link prediction task. The experimental results show that it achieves better performance on two benchmark data sets compared to the baseline RotatE, especially on data set (FB15k-237) with many high in-degree connection nodes.
Knowledge graphs capture interlinked information between entities and they represent an attractive source of structured information that can be harnessed for recommender systems. However, existing recommender engines use knowledge graphs by manually designing features, do not allow for end-to-end training, or provide poor scalability. Here we propose Knowledge Graph Convolutional Networks (KGCN), an end-to-end trainable framework that harnesses item relationships captured by the knowledge graph to provide better recommendations. Conceptually, KGCN computes user-specific item embeddings by first applying a trainable function that identifies important knowledge graph relations for a given user and then transforming the knowledge graph into a user-specific weighted graph. Then, KGCN applies a graph convolutional neural network that computes an embedding of an item node by propagating and aggregating knowledge graph neighborhood information. Moreover, to provide better inductive bias KGCN uses label smoothness (LS), which provides regularization over edge weights and we prove that it is equivalent to label propagation scheme on a graph. Finally, We unify KGCN and LS regularization, and present a scalable minibatch implementation for KGCN-LS model. Experiments show that KGCN-LS outperforms strong baselines in four datasets. KGCN-LS also achieves great performance in sparse scenarios and is highly scalable with respect to the knowledge graph size.
Detecting carried objects is one of the requirements for developing systems to reason about activities involving people and objects. We present an approach to detect carried objects from a single video frame with a novel method that incorporates features from multiple scales. Initially, a foreground mask in a video frame is segmented into multi-scale superpixels. Then the human-like regions in the segmented area are identified by matching a set of extracted features from superpixels against learned features in a codebook. A carried object probability map is generated using the complement of the matching probabilities of superpixels to human-like regions and background information. A group of superpixels with high carried object probability and strong edge support is then merged to obtain the shape of the carried object. We applied our method to two challenging datasets, and results show that our method is competitive with or better than the state-of-the-art.
Recommender System (RS) is a hot area where artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be effectively applied to improve performance. Since the well-known Netflix Challenge, collaborative filtering (CF) has become the most popular and effective recommendation method. Despite their success in CF, various AI techniques still have to face the data sparsity and cold start problems. Previous works tried to solve these two problems by utilizing auxiliary information, such as social connections among users and meta-data of items. However, they process different types of information separately, leading to information loss. In this work, we propose to utilize Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN), which is a natural and general representation of different types of data, to enhance CF-based recommending methods. HIN-based recommender systems face two problems: how to represent high-level semantics for recommendation and how to fuse the heterogeneous information to recommend. To address these problems, we propose to applying meta-graph to HIN-based RS and solve the information fusion problem with a "matrix factorization (MF) + factorization machine (FM)" framework. For the "MF" part, we obtain user-item similarity matrices from each meta-graph and adopt low-rank matrix approximation to get latent features for both users and items. For the "FM" part, we propose to apply FM with Group lasso (FMG) on the obtained features to simultaneously predict missing ratings and select useful meta-graphs. Experimental results on two large real-world datasets, i.e., Amazon and Yelp, show that our proposed approach is better than that of the state-of-the-art FM and other HIN-based recommending methods.
Recently, deep learning has achieved very promising results in visual object tracking. Deep neural networks in existing tracking methods require a lot of training data to learn a large number of parameters. However, training data is not sufficient for visual object tracking as annotations of a target object are only available in the first frame of a test sequence. In this paper, we propose to learn hierarchical features for visual object tracking by using tree structure based Recursive Neural Networks (RNN), which have fewer parameters than other deep neural networks, e.g. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). First, we learn RNN parameters to discriminate between the target object and background in the first frame of a test sequence. Tree structure over local patches of an exemplar region is randomly generated by using a bottom-up greedy search strategy. Given the learned RNN parameters, we create two dictionaries regarding target regions and corresponding local patches based on the learned hierarchical features from both top and leaf nodes of multiple random trees. In each of the subsequent frames, we conduct sparse dictionary coding on all candidates to select the best candidate as the new target location. In addition, we online update two dictionaries to handle appearance changes of target objects. Experimental results demonstrate that our feature learning algorithm can significantly improve tracking performance on benchmark datasets.