6,268 research outputs found
Propagation Kernels
We introduce propagation kernels, a general graph-kernel framework for
efficiently measuring the similarity of structured data. Propagation kernels
are based on monitoring how information spreads through a set of given graphs.
They leverage early-stage distributions from propagation schemes such as random
walks to capture structural information encoded in node labels, attributes, and
edge information. This has two benefits. First, off-the-shelf propagation
schemes can be used to naturally construct kernels for many graph types,
including labeled, partially labeled, unlabeled, directed, and attributed
graphs. Second, by leveraging existing efficient and informative propagation
schemes, propagation kernels can be considerably faster than state-of-the-art
approaches without sacrificing predictive performance. We will also show that
if the graphs at hand have a regular structure, for instance when modeling
image or video data, one can exploit this regularity to scale the kernel
computation to large databases of graphs with thousands of nodes. We support
our contributions by exhaustive experiments on a number of real-world graphs
from a variety of application domains
POISED: Spotting Twitter Spam Off the Beaten Paths
Cybercriminals have found in online social networks a propitious medium to
spread spam and malicious content. Existing techniques for detecting spam
include predicting the trustworthiness of accounts and analyzing the content of
these messages. However, advanced attackers can still successfully evade these
defenses.
Online social networks bring people who have personal connections or share
common interests to form communities. In this paper, we first show that users
within a networked community share some topics of interest. Moreover, content
shared on these social network tend to propagate according to the interests of
people. Dissemination paths may emerge where some communities post similar
messages, based on the interests of those communities. Spam and other malicious
content, on the other hand, follow different spreading patterns.
In this paper, we follow this insight and present POISED, a system that
leverages the differences in propagation between benign and malicious messages
on social networks to identify spam and other unwanted content. We test our
system on a dataset of 1.3M tweets collected from 64K users, and we show that
our approach is effective in detecting malicious messages, reaching 91%
precision and 93% recall. We also show that POISED's detection is more
comprehensive than previous systems, by comparing it to three state-of-the-art
spam detection systems that have been proposed by the research community in the
past. POISED significantly outperforms each of these systems. Moreover, through
simulations, we show how POISED is effective in the early detection of spam
messages and how it is resilient against two well-known adversarial machine
learning attacks
Robust Temporally Coherent Laplacian Protrusion Segmentation of 3D Articulated Bodies
In motion analysis and understanding it is important to be able to fit a
suitable model or structure to the temporal series of observed data, in order
to describe motion patterns in a compact way, and to discriminate between them.
In an unsupervised context, i.e., no prior model of the moving object(s) is
available, such a structure has to be learned from the data in a bottom-up
fashion. In recent times, volumetric approaches in which the motion is captured
from a number of cameras and a voxel-set representation of the body is built
from the camera views, have gained ground due to attractive features such as
inherent view-invariance and robustness to occlusions. Automatic, unsupervised
segmentation of moving bodies along entire sequences, in a temporally-coherent
and robust way, has the potential to provide a means of constructing a
bottom-up model of the moving body, and track motion cues that may be later
exploited for motion classification. Spectral methods such as locally linear
embedding (LLE) can be useful in this context, as they preserve "protrusions",
i.e., high-curvature regions of the 3D volume, of articulated shapes, while
improving their separation in a lower dimensional space, making them in this
way easier to cluster. In this paper we therefore propose a spectral approach
to unsupervised and temporally-coherent body-protrusion segmentation along time
sequences. Volumetric shapes are clustered in an embedding space, clusters are
propagated in time to ensure coherence, and merged or split to accommodate
changes in the body's topology. Experiments on both synthetic and real
sequences of dense voxel-set data are shown. This supports the ability of the
proposed method to cluster body-parts consistently over time in a totally
unsupervised fashion, its robustness to sampling density and shape quality, and
its potential for bottom-up model constructionComment: 31 pages, 26 figure
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