Exploring Kervolutional Neural Networks

A paper published in the CVPR 2019 conference outlines a new technique called 'kervolution' used in a new type of augmented convolutional neural network (CNN) called a 'kervolutional neural network' (KNN). The paper asserts that KNNs achieve faster convergence and higher accuracies than CNNs. This "mini paper" will further examine the findings in the original paper and perform a more in depth analysis of the KNN architecture. This will be done by analyzing the impact of hyper parameters (specifically the learning rate) on KNNs versus CNNs, experimenting with other types of kervolution operations not tested in the original paper, a more rigourous statistical analysis of accuracies and convergence times and additional theoretical analysis. The accompanying code is publicly available.

PACE: Pattern Accurate Computationally Efficient Bootstrapping for Timely Discovery of Cyber-Security Concepts

Public disclosure of important security information, such as knowledge of vulnerabilities or exploits, often occurs in blogs, tweets, mailing lists, and other online sources months before proper classification into structured databases. In order to facilitate timely discovery of such knowledge, we propose a novel semi-supervised learning algorithm, PACE, for identifying and classifying relevant entities in text sources. The main contribution of this paper is an enhancement of the traditional bootstrapping method for entity extraction by employing a time-memory trade-off that simultaneously circumvents a costly corpus search while strengthening pattern nomination, which should increase accuracy. An implementation in the cyber-security domain is discussed as well as challenges to Natural Language Processing imposed by the security domain.