Abrar Fahim

Rohan Saha, Abrar Fahim, Alona Fyshe et al.

For specialized domains, there is often not a wealth of data with which to train large machine learning models. In such limited data / compute settings, various methods exist aiming to $\textit{do more with less}$, such as finetuning from a pretrained model, modulating difficulty levels as data are presented to a model (curriculum learning), and considering the role of model type / size. Approaches to efficient $\textit{machine}$ learning also take inspiration from $\textit{human}$ learning by considering use cases where machine learning systems have access to approximately the same number of words experienced by a 13 year old child (100M words). We investigate the role of 3 primary variables in a limited data regime as part of the multimodal track of the BabyLM challenge. We contrast: (i) curriculum learning, (ii), pretraining (with text-only data), (iii) model type. We modulate these variables and assess them on two types of tasks: (a) multimodal (text+image), and (b) unimodal (text-only) tasks. We find that curriculum learning benefits multimodal evaluations over non-curriclum learning models, particularly when combining text-only pretraining. On text-only tasks, curriculum learning appears to help models with smaller trainable parameter counts. We suggest possible reasons based on architectural differences and training designs as to why one might observe such results.

Abrar Fahim, Shamik Dey, Md. Nurul Absur et al.

Digital systems find it challenging to keep up with cybersecurity threats. The daily emergence of more than 560,000 new malware strains poses significant hazards to the digital ecosystem. The traditional malware detection methods fail to operate properly and yield high false positive rates with low accuracy of the protection system. This study explores the ways in which malware can be detected using these machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches to address those shortcomings. This study also includes a systematic comparison of the performance of some of the widely used ML models, such as random forest, multi-layer perceptron (MLP), and deep neural network (DNN), for determining the effectiveness of the domain of modern malware threat systems. We use a considerable-sized database from Kaggle, which has undergone optimized feature selection and preprocessing to improve model performance. Our finding suggests that the DNN model outperformed the other traditional models with the highest training accuracy of 99.92% and an almost perfect AUC score. Furthermore, the feature selection and preprocessing can help improve the capabilities of detection. This research makes an important contribution by analyzing the performance of the model on the performance metrics and providing insight into the effectiveness of the advanced detection techniques to build more robust and more reliable cybersecurity solutions against the growing malware threats.