如今，由于最近在人工智能（AI）和机器学习（ML）中的近期突破，因此，智能系统和服务越来越受欢迎。然而，机器学习不仅满足软件工程，不仅具有有希望的潜力，而且还具有一些固有的挑战。尽管最近的一些研究努力，但我们仍然没有明确了解开发基于ML的申请和当前行业实践的挑战。此外，目前尚不清楚软件工程研究人员应将其努力集中起来，以更好地支持ML应用程序开发人员。在本文中，我们报告了一个旨在了解ML应用程序开发的挑战和最佳实践的调查。我们合成从80名从业者（以不同的技能，经验和应用领域）获得的结果为17个调查结果;概述ML应用程序开发的挑战和最佳实践。参与基于ML的软件系统发展的从业者可以利用总结最佳实践来提高其系统的质量。我们希望报告的挑战将通知研究界有关需要调查的主题，以改善工程过程和基于ML的申请的质量。

In this paper, we assess the viability of transformer models in end-to-end InfoSec settings, in which no intermediate feature representations or processing steps occur outside the model. We implement transformer models for two distinct InfoSec data formats - specifically URLs and PE files - in a novel end-to-end approach, and explore a variety of architectural designs, training regimes, and experimental settings to determine the ingredients necessary for performant detection models. We show that in contrast to conventional transformers trained on more standard NLP-related tasks, our URL transformer model requires a different training approach to reach high performance levels. Specifically, we show that 1) pre-training on a massive corpus of unlabeled URL data for an auto-regressive task does not readily transfer to binary classification of malicious or benign URLs, but 2) that using an auxiliary auto-regressive loss improves performance when training from scratch. We introduce a method for mixed objective optimization, which dynamically balances contributions from both loss terms so that neither one of them dominates. We show that this method yields quantitative evaluation metrics comparable to that of several top-performing benchmark classifiers. Unlike URLs, binary executables contain longer and more distributed sequences of information-rich bytes. To accommodate such lengthy byte sequences, we introduce additional context length into the transformer by providing its self-attention layers with an adaptive span similar to Sukhbaatar et al. We demonstrate that this approach performs comparably to well-established malware detection models on benchmark PE file datasets, but also point out the need for further exploration into model improvements in scalability and compute efficiency.

恶意软件（恶意软件）分类为持续学习（CL）制度提供了独特的挑战，这是由于每天收到的新样本的数量以及恶意软件的发展以利用新漏洞。在典型的一天中，防病毒供应商将获得数十万个独特的软件，包括恶意和良性，并且在恶意软件分类器的一生中，有超过十亿个样品很容易积累。鉴于问题的规模，使用持续学习技术的顺序培训可以在减少培训和存储开销方面提供可观的好处。但是，迄今为止，还没有对CL应用于恶意软件分类任务的探索。在本文中，我们研究了11种应用于三个恶意软件任务的CL技术，涵盖了常见的增量学习方案，包括任务，类和域增量学习（IL）。具体而言，使用两个现实的大规模恶意软件数据集，我们评估了CL方法在二进制恶意软件分类（domain-il）和多类恶意软件家庭分类（Task-IL和类IL）任务上的性能。令我们惊讶的是，在几乎所有情况下，持续的学习方法显着不足以使训练数据的幼稚关节重播 - 在某些情况下，将精度降低了70个百分点以上。与关节重播相比，有选择性重播20％的存储数据的一种简单方法可以实现更好的性能，占训练时间的50％。最后，我们讨论了CL技术表现出乎意料差的潜在原因，希望它激发进一步研究在恶意软件分类域中更有效的技术。

Pneumonia, a respiratory infection brought on by bacteria or viruses, affects a large number of people, especially in developing and impoverished countries where high levels of pollution, unclean living conditions, and overcrowding are frequently observed, along with insufficient medical infrastructure. Pleural effusion, a condition in which fluids fill the lung and complicate breathing, is brought on by pneumonia. Early detection of pneumonia is essential for ensuring curative care and boosting survival rates. The approach most usually used to diagnose pneumonia is chest X-ray imaging. The purpose of this work is to develop a method for the automatic diagnosis of bacterial and viral pneumonia in digital x-ray pictures. This article first presents the authors' technique, and then gives a comprehensive report on recent developments in the field of reliable diagnosis of pneumonia. In this study, here tuned a state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural network to classify plant diseases based on images and tested its performance. Deep learning architecture is compared empirically. VGG19, ResNet with 152v2, Resnext101, Seresnet152, Mobilenettv2, and DenseNet with 201 layers are among the architectures tested. Experiment data consists of two groups, sick and healthy X-ray pictures. To take appropriate action against plant diseases as soon as possible, rapid disease identification models are preferred. DenseNet201 has shown no overfitting or performance degradation in our experiments, and its accuracy tends to increase as the number of epochs increases. Further, DenseNet201 achieves state-of-the-art performance with a significantly a smaller number of parameters and within a reasonable computing time. This architecture outperforms the competition in terms of testing accuracy, scoring 95%. Each architecture was trained using Keras, using Theano as the backend.

Pruning refers to the elimination of trivial weights from neural networks. The sub-networks within an overparameterized model produced after pruning are often called Lottery tickets. This research aims to generate winning lottery tickets from a set of lottery tickets that can achieve similar accuracy to the original unpruned network. We introduce a novel winning ticket called Cyclic Overlapping Lottery Ticket (COLT) by data splitting and cyclic retraining of the pruned network from scratch. We apply a cyclic pruning algorithm that keeps only the overlapping weights of different pruned models trained on different data segments. Our results demonstrate that COLT can achieve similar accuracies (obtained by the unpruned model) while maintaining high sparsities. We show that the accuracy of COLT is on par with the winning tickets of Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) and, at times, is better. Moreover, COLTs can be generated using fewer iterations than tickets generated by the popular Iterative Magnitude Pruning (IMP) method. In addition, we also notice COLTs generated on large datasets can be transferred to small ones without compromising performance, demonstrating its generalizing capability. We conduct all our experiments on Cifar-10, Cifar-100 & TinyImageNet datasets and report superior performance than the state-of-the-art methods.

The task of locating and classifying different types of vehicles has become a vital element in numerous applications of automation and intelligent systems ranging from traffic surveillance to vehicle identification and many more. In recent times, Deep Learning models have been dominating the field of vehicle detection. Yet, Bangladeshi vehicle detection has remained a relatively unexplored area. One of the main goals of vehicle detection is its real-time application, where `You Only Look Once' (YOLO) models have proven to be the most effective architecture. In this work, intending to find the best-suited YOLO architecture for fast and accurate vehicle detection from traffic images in Bangladesh, we have conducted a performance analysis of different variants of the YOLO-based architectures such as YOLOV3, YOLOV5s, and YOLOV5x. The models were trained on a dataset containing 7390 images belonging to 21 types of vehicles comprising samples from the DhakaAI dataset, the Poribohon-BD dataset, and our self-collected images. After thorough quantitative and qualitative analysis, we found the YOLOV5x variant to be the best-suited model, performing better than YOLOv3 and YOLOv5s models respectively by 7 & 4 percent in mAP, and 12 & 8.5 percent in terms of Accuracy.

Deep learning (DL) models of code have recently reported great progress for vulnerability detection. In some cases, DL-based models have outperformed static analysis tools. Although many great models have been proposed, we do not yet have a good understanding of these models. This limits the further advancement of model robustness, debugging, and deployment for the vulnerability detection. In this paper, we surveyed and reproduced 9 state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning models on 2 widely used vulnerability detection datasets: Devign and MSR. We investigated 6 research questions in three areas, namely model capabilities, training data, and model interpretation. We experimentally demonstrated the variability between different runs of a model and the low agreement among different models' outputs. We investigated models trained for specific types of vulnerabilities compared to a model that is trained on all the vulnerabilities at once. We explored the types of programs DL may consider "hard" to handle. We investigated the relations of training data sizes and training data composition with model performance. Finally, we studied model interpretations and analyzed important features that the models used to make predictions. We believe that our findings can help better understand model results, provide guidance on preparing training data, and improve the robustness of the models. All of our datasets, code, and results are available at https://figshare.com/s/284abfba67dba448fdc2.

The policy gradient method enjoys the simplicity of the objective where the agent optimizes the cumulative reward directly. Moreover, in the continuous action domain, parameterized distribution of action distribution allows easy control of exploration, resulting from the variance of the representing distribution. Entropy can play an essential role in policy optimization by selecting the stochastic policy, which eventually helps better explore the environment in reinforcement learning (RL). However, the stochasticity often reduces as the training progresses; thus, the policy becomes less exploratory. Additionally, certain parametric distributions might only work for some environments and require extensive hyperparameter tuning. This paper aims to mitigate these issues. In particular, we propose an algorithm called Robust Policy Optimization (RPO), which leverages a perturbed distribution. We hypothesize that our method encourages high-entropy actions and provides a way to represent the action space better. We further provide empirical evidence to verify our hypothesis. We evaluated our methods on various continuous control tasks from DeepMind Control, OpenAI Gym, Pybullet, and IsaacGym. We observed that in many settings, RPO increases the policy entropy early in training and then maintains a certain level of entropy throughout the training period. Eventually, our agent RPO shows consistently improved performance compared to PPO and other techniques: entropy regularization, different distributions, and data augmentation. Furthermore, in several settings, our method stays robust in performance, while other baseline mechanisms fail to improve and even worsen the performance.

Accurate recognition of food items along with quality assessment is of paramount importance in the agricultural industry. Such automated systems can speed up the wheel of the food processing sector and save tons of manual labor. In this connection, the recent advancement of Deep learning-based architectures has introduced a wide variety of solutions offering remarkable performance in several classification tasks. In this work, we have exploited the concept of Densely Connected Convolutional Neural Networks (DenseNets) for fruit quality assessment. The feature propagation towards the deeper layers has enabled the network to tackle the vanishing gradient problems and ensured the reuse of features to learn meaningful insights. Evaluating on a dataset of 19,526 images containing six fruits having three quality grades for each, the proposed pipeline achieved a remarkable accuracy of 99.67%. The robustness of the model was further tested for fruit classification and quality assessment tasks where the model produced a similar performance, which makes it suitable for real-life applications.

Alzheimer's patients gradually lose their ability to think, behave, and interact with others. Medical history, laboratory tests, daily activities, and personality changes can all be used to diagnose the disorder. A series of time-consuming and expensive tests are used to diagnose the illness. The most effective way to identify Alzheimer's disease is using a Random-forest classifier in this study, along with various other Machine Learning techniques. The main goal of this study is to fine-tune the classifier to detect illness with fewer tests while maintaining a reasonable disease discovery accuracy. We successfully identified the condition in almost 94% of cases using four of the thirty frequently utilized indicators.