OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Boosting Black-box Attack to Deep Neural Networks with Conditional Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Existing black-box attacks have demonstrated promising potential in creating adversarial examples (AE) to deceive deep learning models. Most of these attacks need to handle a vast optimization space and require a large number of queries, hence exhibiting limited practical impacts in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel black-box attack strategy, Conditional Diffusion Model Attack (CDMA), to improve the query efficiency of generating AEs under query-limited situations. The key insight of CDMA is to formulate the task of AE synthesis as a distribution transformation problem, i.e., benign examples and their corresponding AEs can be regarded as coming from two distinctive distributions and can transform from each other with a particular converter. Unlike the conventional \textit{query-and-optimization} approach, we generate eligible AEs with direct conditional transform using the aforementioned data converter, which can significantly reduce the number of queries needed. CDMA adopts the conditional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model as the converter, which can learn the transformation from clean samples to AEs, and ensure the smooth development of perturbed noise resistant to various defense strategies. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CDMA by comparing it with nine state-of-the-art black-box attacks across three benchmark datasets. On average, CDMA can reduce the query count to a handful of times; in most cases, the query count is only ONE. We also show that CDMA can obtain $>99\%$ attack success rate for untarget attacks over all datasets and targeted attack over CIFAR-10 with the noise budget of $ε=16$.
CM-PIE: Cross-modal perception for interactive-enhanced audio-visual video parsing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Audio-visual video parsing is the task of categorizing a video at the segment level with weak labels, and predicting them as audible or visible events. Recent methods for this task leverage the attention mechanism to capture the semantic correlations among the whole video across the audio-visual modalities. However, these approaches have overlooked the importance of individual segments within a video and the relationship among them, and tend to rely on a single modality when learning features. In this paper, we propose a novel interactive-enhanced cross-modal perception method~(CM-PIE), which can learn fine-grained features by applying a segment-based attention module. Furthermore, a cross-modal aggregation block is introduced to jointly optimize the semantic representation of audio and visual signals by enhancing inter-modal interactions. The experimental results show that our model offers improved parsing performance on the Look, Listen, and Parse dataset compared to other methods.
ProtoHPE: Prototype-guided High-frequency Patch Enhancement for Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Visible-infrared person re-identification is challenging due to the large modality gap. To bridge the gap, most studies heavily rely on the correlation of visible-infrared holistic person images, which may perform poorly under severe distribution shifts. In contrast, we find that some cross-modal correlated high-frequency components contain discriminative visual patterns and are less affected by variations such as wavelength, pose, and background clutter than holistic images. Therefore, we are motivated to bridge the modality gap based on such high-frequency components, and propose \textbf{Proto}type-guided \textbf{H}igh-frequency \textbf{P}atch \textbf{E}nhancement (ProtoHPE) with two core designs. \textbf{First}, to enhance the representation ability of cross-modal correlated high-frequency components, we split patches with such components by Wavelet Transform and exponential moving average Vision Transformer (ViT), then empower ViT to take the split patches as auxiliary input. \textbf{Second}, to obtain semantically compact and discriminative high-frequency representations of the same identity, we propose Multimodal Prototypical Contrast. To be specific, it hierarchically captures the comprehensive semantics of different modal instances, facilitating the aggregation of high-frequency representations belonging to the same identity. With it, ViT can capture key high-frequency components during inference without relying on ProtoHPE, thus bringing no extra complexity. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of ProtoHPE.
Leader-Follower Formation Control of Perturbed Nonholonomic Agents along Parametric Curves with Directed Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we propose a novel formation controller for nonholonomic agents to form general parametric curves. First, we derive a unified parametric representation for both open and closed curves. Then, a leader-follower formation controller is designed to form the parametric curves. We consider directed communications and constant input disturbances rejection in the controller design. Rigorous Lyapunov-based stability analysis proves the asymptotic stability of the proposed controller. Detailed numerical simulations and experimental studies are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed method.
QACHECK: A Demonstration System for Question-Guided Multi-Hop Fact-Checking
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Fact-checking real-world claims often requires complex, multi-step reasoning due to the absence of direct evidence to support or refute them. However, existing fact-checking systems often lack transparency in their decision-making, making it challenging for users to comprehend their reasoning process. To address this, we propose the Question-guided Multi-hop Fact-Checking (QACHECK) system, which guides the model's reasoning process by asking a series of questions critical for verifying a claim. QACHECK has five key modules: a claim verifier, a question generator, a question-answering module, a QA validator, and a reasoner. Users can input a claim into QACHECK, which then predicts its veracity and provides a comprehensive report detailing its reasoning process, guided by a sequence of (question, answer) pairs. QACHECK also provides the source of evidence supporting each question, fostering a transparent, explainable, and user-friendly fact-checking process. A recorded video of QACHECK is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju8kxSldM64
PHYDI: Initializing Parameterized Hypercomplex Neural Networks as Identity Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Neural models based on hypercomplex algebra systems are growing and prolificating for a plethora of applications, ranging from computer vision to natural language processing. Hand in hand with their adoption, parameterized hypercomplex neural networks (PHNNs) are growing in size and no techniques have been adopted so far to control their convergence at a large scale. In this paper, we study PHNNs convergence and propose parameterized hypercomplex identity initialization (PHYDI), a method to improve their convergence at different scales, leading to more robust performance when the number of layers scales up, while also reaching the same performance with fewer iterations. We show the effectiveness of this approach in different benchmarks and with common PHNNs with ResNets- and Transformer-based architecture. The code is available at https://github.com/ispamm/PHYDI.
Hypercomplex Multimodal Emotion Recognition from EEG and Peripheral Physiological Signals
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Multimodal emotion recognition from physiological signals is receiving an increasing amount of attention due to the impossibility to control them at will unlike behavioral reactions, thus providing more reliable information. Existing deep learning-based methods still rely on extracted handcrafted features, not taking full advantage of the learning ability of neural networks, and often adopt a single-modality approach, while human emotions are inherently expressed in a multimodal way. In this paper, we propose a hypercomplex multimodal network equipped with a novel fusion module comprising parameterized hypercomplex multiplications. Indeed, by operating in a hypercomplex domain the operations follow algebraic rules which allow to model latent relations among learned feature dimensions for a more effective fusion step. We perform classification of valence and arousal from electroencephalogram (EEG) and peripheral physiological signals, employing the publicly available database MAHNOB-HCI surpassing a multimodal state-of-the-art network. The code of our work is freely available at https://github.com/ispamm/MHyEEG.
Mini-DALLE3: Interactive Text to Image by Prompting Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

The revolution of artificial intelligence content generation has been rapidly accelerated with the booming text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models. Within just two years of development, it was unprecedentedly of high-quality, diversity, and creativity that the state-of-the-art models could generate. However, a prevalent limitation persists in the effective communication with these popular T2I models, such as Stable Diffusion, using natural language descriptions. This typically makes an engaging image hard to obtain without expertise in prompt engineering with complex word compositions, magic tags, and annotations. Inspired by the recently released DALLE3 - a T2I model directly built-in ChatGPT that talks human language, we revisit the existing T2I systems endeavoring to align human intent and introduce a new task - interactive text to image (iT2I), where people can interact with LLM for interleaved high-quality image generation/edit/refinement and question answering with stronger images and text correspondences using natural language. In addressing the iT2I problem, we present a simple approach that augments LLMs for iT2I with prompting techniques and off-the-shelf T2I models. We evaluate our approach for iT2I in a variety of common-used scenarios under different LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT, LLAMA, Baichuan, and InternLM. We demonstrate that our approach could be a convenient and low-cost way to introduce the iT2I ability for any existing LLMs and any text-to-image models without any training while bringing little degradation on LLMs' inherent capabilities in, e.g., question answering and code generation. We hope this work could draw broader attention and provide inspiration for boosting user experience in human-machine interactions alongside the image quality of the next-generation T2I systems.
HaarNet: Large-scale Linear-Morphological Hybrid Network for RGB-D Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Signals from different modalities each have their own combination algebra which affects their sampling processing. RGB is mostly linear; depth is a geometric signal following the operations of mathematical morphology. If a network obtaining RGB-D input has both kinds of operators available in its layers, it should be able to give effective output with fewer parameters. In this paper, morphological elements in conjunction with more familiar linear modules are used to construct a mixed linear-morphological network called HaarNet. This is the first large-scale linear-morphological hybrid, evaluated on a set of sizeable real-world datasets. In the network, morphological Haar sampling is applied to both feature channels in several layers, which splits extreme values and high-frequency information such that both can be processed to improve both modalities. Moreover, morphologically parameterised ReLU is used, and morphologically-sound up-sampling is applied to obtain a full-resolution output. Experiments show that HaarNet is competitive with a state-of-the-art CNN, implying that morphological networks are a promising research direction for geometry-based learning tasks.
Discovery of Novel Reticular Materials for Carbon Dioxide Capture using GFlowNets
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2023
Year: 2023

Artificial intelligence holds promise to improve materials discovery. GFlowNets are an emerging deep learning algorithm with many applications in AI-assisted discovery. By using GFlowNets, we generate porous reticular materials, such as metal organic frameworks and covalent organic frameworks, for applications in carbon dioxide capture. We introduce a new Python package (matgfn) to train and sample GFlowNets. We use matgfn to generate the matgfn-rm dataset of novel and diverse reticular materials with gravimetric surface area above 5000 m$^2$/g. We calculate single- and two-component gas adsorption isotherms for the top-100 candidates in matgfn-rm. These candidates are novel compared to the state-of-art ARC-MOF dataset and rank in the 90th percentile in terms of working capacity compared to the CoRE2019 dataset. We discover 15 materials outperforming all materials in CoRE2019.
Prediction of MET Overexpression in Non-Small Cell Lung Adenocarcinomas from Hematoxylin and Eosin Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

MET protein overexpression is a targetable event in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and is the subject of active drug development. Challenges in identifying patients for these therapies include lack of access to validated testing, such as standardized immunohistochemistry (IHC) assessment, and consumption of valuable tissue for a single gene/protein assay. Development of pre-screening algorithms using routinely available digitized hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained slides to predict MET overexpression could promote testing for those who will benefit most. While assessment of MET expression using IHC is currently not routinely performed in NSCLC, next-generation sequencing is common and in some cases includes RNA expression panel testing. In this work, we leveraged a large database of matched H&E slides and RNA expression data to train a weakly supervised model to predict MET RNA overexpression directly from H&E images. This model was evaluated on an independent holdout test set of 300 over-expressed and 289 normal patients, demonstrating an ROC-AUC of 0.70 (95th percentile interval: 0.66 - 0.74) with stable performance characteristics across different patient clinical variables and robust to synthetic noise on the test set. These results suggest that H&E-based predictive models could be useful to prioritize patients for confirmatory testing of MET protein or MET gene expression status.
Long-term and Real-time High-speed Underwater Wireless Optical Communications in Deep Sea
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Seafloor observation network can perform all-weather, long-term, continuous, real-time, and in-situ observation of the ocean by combing various observation methods including cabled seafloor nodes, self-contained nodes, as well as mobile platforms, where reliable and long-term high-speed underwater wireless communication becomes an essential demand. Recently, underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) has emerged as a highly promising solution and is rapidly becoming a research hotspot for meeting this requirement. In this article, we demonstrate the experiment and application of high-speed UWOC system for deep sea seafloor observation network. To the best of our knowledge this is the first long-term real-time deep-sea UWOC link with bitrate as high as 125 Mbps. Between 30 m distance and at a depth of 1650 m, two-way Ethernet UWOC links are realized with 125 Mbps direction-adjustable green light link and 6.25 Mbps non-line-of-sight (NLOS) blue light link. High quality video transmission of 8K 30 FPS and 4K 120 FPS are realized through high-speed 125 Mbps green light link, with 100% peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) agreement, showing the capability of transmitting high-quality videos lossless. The 30-day long-term measurement results show that the BER performance of both 125 Mbps and 6.25 Mbps links is lower than 10-5, proving the stability and reliability of this UWOC system at depth of 1650 m. The maximum transmission distance for the green and blue light links are estimated to be 117.7 and 128.3 m with considering the geometry loss, which can be extended to 231.6 and 337.5 m without geometry loss. As the first long-term and real-time UWOC system in deep sea, we believe this demonstration can provide valuable experience for further UWOC studies and converged ocean observation networking with cabled and cable-less observation platforms.
Deep Learning based Systems for Crater Detection: A Review
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Craters are one of the most prominent features on planetary surfaces, used in applications such as age estimation, hazard detection, and spacecraft navigation. Crater detection is a challenging problem due to various aspects, including complex crater characteristics such as varying sizes and shapes, data resolution, and planetary data types. Similar to other computer vision tasks, deep learning-based approaches have significantly impacted research on crater detection in recent years. This survey aims to assist researchers in this field by examining the development of deep learning-based crater detection algorithms (CDAs). The review includes over 140 research works covering diverse crater detection approaches, including planetary data, craters database, and evaluation metrics. To be specific, we discuss the challenges in crater detection due to the complex properties of the craters and survey the DL-based CDAs by categorizing them into three parts: (a) semantic segmentation-based, (b) object detection-based, and (c) classification-based. Additionally, we have conducted training and testing of all the semantic segmentation-based CDAs on a common dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of each architecture for crater detection and its potential applications. Finally, we have provided recommendations for potential future works.
Identity Collapse? Realignment of Taiwanese Voters in the 2024 Presidential Elections on Social Media
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

The 2024 Taiwanese Presidential Election is not just a critical geopolitical event, it also engages with long-standing debate in politics regarding the factors that lead to the rise of new political parties and candidates. In 2021, the Economist called Taiwan "the most dangerous place on earth" due to its critical role in a fragile supply chain. Additionally, a four-candidate race has emerged in a traditionally bipartisan election which begs the question: how will voters realign given the choice of four candidates? Leveraging more than a million posts on social media, we analyze user (predominantly Taiwanese) discourse and engagement along the axes of national identity, issue topic, and partisan alignment. Results reveal alternative candidates (Ko and Gou) draw attention from the fringes rather than the center relative to national identity, and traditional candidates derive more engagement from the traditional media and salience to geopolitical issues. Crucially, in-group references generate more engagement than out-group references, contrary to Western-based studies. We discuss how the dissolution of Taiwan's single-issue society may not just lead to more viable candidates and multi-issue discourse, but the misalignment of national and partisan identity may heal deep-seated partisan cleavages.
PointHR: Exploring High-Resolution Architectures for 3D Point Cloud Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Significant progress has been made recently in point cloud segmentation utilizing an encoder-decoder framework, which initially encodes point clouds into low-resolution representations and subsequently decodes high-resolution predictions. Inspired by the success of high-resolution architectures in image dense prediction, which always maintains a high-resolution representation throughout the entire learning process, we consider it also highly important for 3D dense point cloud analysis. Therefore, in this paper, we explore high-resolution architectures for 3D point cloud segmentation. Specifically, we generalize high-resolution architectures using a unified pipeline named PointHR, which includes a knn-based sequence operator for feature extraction and a differential resampling operator to efficiently communicate different resolutions. Additionally, we propose to avoid numerous on-the-fly computations of high-resolution architectures by pre-computing the indices for both sequence and resampling operators. By doing so, we deliver highly competitive high-resolution architectures while capitalizing on the benefits of well-designed point cloud blocks without additional effort. To evaluate these architectures for dense point cloud analysis, we conduct thorough experiments using S3DIS and ScanNetV2 datasets, where the proposed PointHR outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods without any bells and whistles. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/haibo-qiu/PointHR}.
OpenLEAF: Open-Domain Interleaved Image-Text Generation and Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This work investigates a challenging task named open-domain interleaved image-text generation, which generates interleaved texts and images following an input query. We propose a new interleaved generation framework based on prompting large-language models (LLMs) and pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) models, namely OpenLEAF. In OpenLEAF, the LLM generates textual descriptions, coordinates T2I models, creates visual prompts for generating images, and incorporates global contexts into the T2I models. This global context improves the entity and style consistencies of images in the interleaved generation. For model assessment, we first propose to use large multi-modal models (LMMs) to evaluate the entity and style consistencies of open-domain interleaved image-text sequences. According to the LMM evaluation on our constructed evaluation set, the proposed interleaved generation framework can generate high-quality image-text content for various domains and applications, such as how-to question answering, storytelling, graphical story rewriting, and webpage/poster generation tasks. Moreover, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed LMM evaluation technique with human assessment. We hope our proposed framework, benchmark, and LMM evaluation could help establish the intriguing interleaved image-text generation task.
Promoting Robustness of Randomized Smoothing: Two Cost-Effective Approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Randomized smoothing has recently attracted attentions in the field of adversarial robustness to provide provable robustness guarantees on smoothed neural network classifiers. However, existing works show that vanilla randomized smoothing usually does not provide good robustness performance and often requires (re)training techniques on the base classifier in order to boost the robustness of the resulting smoothed classifier. In this work, we propose two cost-effective approaches to boost the robustness of randomized smoothing while preserving its clean performance. The first approach introduces a new robust training method AdvMacerwhich combines adversarial training and robustness certification maximization for randomized smoothing. We show that AdvMacer can improve the robustness performance of randomized smoothing classifiers compared to SOTA baselines, while being 3x faster to train than MACER baseline. The second approach introduces a post-processing method EsbRS which greatly improves the robustness certificate based on building model ensembles. We explore different aspects of model ensembles that has not been studied by prior works and propose a novel design methodology to further improve robustness of the ensemble based on our theoretical analysis.