在线社交网络由于其在低质量信息的传播中的作用而积极参与删除恶意社交机器人。但是，大多数现有的机器人检测器都是监督分类器，无法捕获复杂机器人的不断发展的行为。在这里，我们提出了Mulbot，这是一种基于多元时间序列（MTS）的无监督的机器人检测器。我们第一次利用从用户时间表中提取的多维时间功能。我们使用LSTM AutoCododer管理多维性，该模块将MTS投射在合适的潜在空间中。然后，我们对此编码表示形式执行聚类步骤，以识别非常相似用户的密集组 - 一种已知的自动化迹象。最后，我们执行一项二进制分类任务，以达到F1得分$ = 0.99 $，表现优于最先进的方法（F1分数$ \ le 0.97 $）。 Mulbot不仅在二进制分类任务中取得了出色的成果，而且我们还在一项新颖且实际上相关的任务中证明了它的优势：检测和分离不同的僵尸网络。在此多级分类任务中，我们实现了F1得分$ = 0.96 $。我们通过估计模型中使用的不同特征的重要性，并通过评估Mulbot推广到新看不见的机器人的能力，从而提出了解决监督机器人探测器的概括性缺陷的解决方案。

对手示例是对机器学习系统的输入，导致来自该系统的输出不正确。通过这种类型的输入发射的攻击可能导致严重后果：例如，在图像识别领域中，停止信号可以被错误分类为速度限制指示。但是，对抗示例也代表了不同的研究方向的燃料域名和应用程序。在这里，我们概述了如何能够获得有利可图的强大工具，以构建更强大的学习模型，能够更好地攻击，两个关键任务：假新闻和社交机器人检测。

近年来，在网上见证了令人反感的内容的泛滥，例如假新闻，宣传，错误信息和虚假信息。虽然最初这主要是关于文本内容，但随着时间的流逝，图像和视频越来越受欢迎，因为它们更容易消费，吸引更多的关注并比文本更广泛地传播。结果，研究人员开始利用不同的方式及其组合来解决在线多模式进攻内容。在这项研究中，我们提供了有关最新的多模式虚假信息检测的调查，该检测涵盖了各种模式组合：文本，图像，语音，视频，社交媒体网络结构和时间信息。此外，尽管有些研究集中于事实，但其他研究调查了内容的有害性。尽管虚假信息定义中的这两个组成部分（i）事实和（ii）有害性同样重要，但通常会孤立地研究它们。因此，我们主张在同一框架中考虑多种方式以及事实和有害性来解决虚假信息检测。最后，我们讨论当前的挑战和未来的研究方向

It is well known that conservative mechanical systems exhibit local oscillatory behaviours due to their elastic and gravitational potentials, which completely characterise these periodic motions together with the inertial properties of the system. The classification of these periodic behaviours and their geometric characterisation are in an on-going secular debate, which recently led to the so-called eigenmanifold theory. The eigenmanifold characterises nonlinear oscillations as a generalisation of linear eigenspaces. With the motivation of performing periodic tasks efficiently, we use tools coming from this theory to construct an optimization problem aimed at inducing desired closed-loop oscillations through a state feedback law. We solve the constructed optimization problem via gradient-descent methods involving neural networks. Extensive simulations show the validity of the approach.

Detecting anomalous data within time series is a very relevant task in pattern recognition and machine learning, with many possible applications that range from disease prevention in medicine, e.g., detecting early alterations of the health status before it can clearly be defined as "illness" up to monitoring industrial plants. Regarding this latter application, detecting anomalies in an industrial plant's status firstly prevents serious damages that would require a long interruption of the production process. Secondly, it permits optimal scheduling of maintenance interventions by limiting them to urgent situations. At the same time, they typically follow a fixed prudential schedule according to which components are substituted well before the end of their expected lifetime. This paper describes a case study regarding the monitoring of the status of Laser-guided Vehicles (LGVs) batteries, on which we worked as our contribution to project SUPER (Supercomputing Unified Platform, Emilia Romagna) aimed at establishing and demonstrating a regional High-Performance Computing platform that is going to represent the main Italian supercomputing environment for both computing power and data volume.

Methods based on ordinary differential equations (ODEs) are widely used to build generative models of time-series. In addition to high computational overhead due to explicitly computing hidden states recurrence, existing ODE-based models fall short in learning sequence data with sharp transitions - common in many real-world systems - due to numerical challenges during optimization. In this work, we propose LS4, a generative model for sequences with latent variables evolving according to a state space ODE to increase modeling capacity. Inspired by recent deep state space models (S4), we achieve speedups by leveraging a convolutional representation of LS4 which bypasses the explicit evaluation of hidden states. We show that LS4 significantly outperforms previous continuous-time generative models in terms of marginal distribution, classification, and prediction scores on real-world datasets in the Monash Forecasting Repository, and is capable of modeling highly stochastic data with sharp temporal transitions. LS4 sets state-of-the-art for continuous-time latent generative models, with significant improvement of mean squared error and tighter variational lower bounds on irregularly-sampled datasets, while also being x100 faster than other baselines on long sequences.

This project leverages advances in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to improve the efficiency and flexibility of order-picking systems for commercial warehouses. We envision a warehouse of the future in which dozens of mobile robots and human pickers work together to collect and deliver items within the warehouse. The fundamental problem we tackle, called the order-picking problem, is how these worker agents must coordinate their movement and actions in the warehouse to maximise performance (e.g. order throughput) under given resource constraints. Established industry methods using heuristic approaches require large engineering efforts to optimise for innately variable warehouse configurations. In contrast, the MARL framework can be flexibly applied to any warehouse configuration (e.g. size, layout, number/types of workers, item replenishment frequency) and the agents learn via a process of trial-and-error how to optimally cooperate with one another. This paper details the current status of the R&D effort initiated by Dematic and the University of Edinburgh towards a general-purpose and scalable MARL solution for the order-picking problem in realistic warehouses.

With the rise in high resolution remote sensing technologies there has been an explosion in the amount of data available for forest monitoring, and an accompanying growth in artificial intelligence applications to automatically derive forest properties of interest from these datasets. Many studies use their own data at small spatio-temporal scales, and demonstrate an application of an existing or adapted data science method for a particular task. This approach often involves intensive and time-consuming data collection and processing, but generates results restricted to specific ecosystems and sensor types. There is a lack of widespread acknowledgement of how the types and structures of data used affects performance and accuracy of analysis algorithms. To accelerate progress in the field more efficiently, benchmarking datasets upon which methods can be tested and compared are sorely needed. Here, we discuss how lack of standardisation impacts confidence in estimation of key forest properties, and how considerations of data collection need to be accounted for in assessing method performance. We present pragmatic requirements and considerations for the creation of rigorous, useful benchmarking datasets for forest monitoring applications, and discuss how tools from modern data science can improve use of existing data. We list a set of example large-scale datasets that could contribute to benchmarking, and present a vision for how community-driven, representative benchmarking initiatives could benefit the field.

In this work, we devise robust and efficient learning protocols for orchestrating a Federated Learning (FL) process for the Federated Tumor Segmentation Challenge (FeTS 2022). Enabling FL for FeTS setup is challenging mainly due to data heterogeneity among collaborators and communication cost of training. To tackle these challenges, we propose Robust Learning Protocol (RoLePRO) which is a combination of server-side adaptive optimisation (e.g., server-side Adam) and judicious parameter (weights) aggregation schemes (e.g., adaptive weighted aggregation). RoLePRO takes a two-phase approach, where the first phase consists of vanilla Federated Averaging, while the second phase consists of a judicious aggregation scheme that uses a sophisticated reweighting, all in the presence of an adaptive optimisation algorithm at the server. We draw insights from extensive experimentation to tune learning rates for the two phases.

The paper addresses the problem of time offset synchronization in the presence of temperature variations, which lead to a non-Gaussian environment. In this context, regular Kalman filtering reveals to be suboptimal. A functional optimization approach is developed in order to approximate optimal estimation of the clock offset between master and slave. A numerical approximation is provided to this aim, based on regular neural network training. Other heuristics are provided as well, based on spline regression. An extensive performance evaluation highlights the benefits of the proposed techniques, which can be easily generalized to several clock synchronization protocols and operating environments.