OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning to Generalize over Subpartitions for Heterogeneity-aware Domain Adaptive Nuclei Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Annotation scarcity and cross-modality/stain data distribution shifts are two major obstacles hindering the application of deep learning models for nuclei analysis, which holds a broad spectrum of potential applications in digital pathology. Recently, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods have been proposed to mitigate the distributional gap between different imaging modalities for unsupervised nuclei segmentation in histopathology images. However, existing UDA methods are built upon the assumption that data distributions within each domain should be uniform. Based on the over-simplified supposition, they propose to align the histopathology target domain with the source domain integrally, neglecting severe intra-domain discrepancy over subpartitions incurred by mixed cancer types and sampling organs. In this paper, for the first time, we propose to explicitly consider the heterogeneity within the histopathology domain and introduce open compound domain adaptation (OCDA) to resolve the crux. In specific, a two-stage disentanglement framework is proposed to acquire domain-invariant feature representations at both image and instance levels. The holistic design addresses the limitations of existing OCDA approaches which struggle to capture instance-wise variations. Two regularization strategies are specifically devised herein to leverage the rich subpartition-specific characteristics in histopathology images and facilitate subdomain decomposition. Moreover, we propose a dual-branch nucleus shape and structure preserving module to prevent nucleus over-generation and deformation in the synthesized images. Experimental results on both cross-modality and cross-stain scenarios over a broad range of diverse datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method compared with state-of-the-art UDA and OCDA methods.
Enhancing Surveillance Camera FOV Quality via Semantic Line Detection and Classification with Deep Hough Transform
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The quality of recorded videos and images is significantly influenced by the camera's field of view (FOV). In critical applications like surveillance systems and self-driving cars, an inadequate FOV can give rise to severe safety and security concerns, including car accidents and thefts due to the failure to detect individuals and objects. The conventional methods for establishing the correct FOV heavily rely on human judgment and lack automated mechanisms to assess video and image quality based on FOV. In this paper, we introduce an innovative approach that harnesses semantic line detection and classification alongside deep Hough transform to identify semantic lines, thus ensuring a suitable FOV by understanding 3D view through parallel lines. Our approach yields an effective F1 score of 0.729 on the public EgoCart dataset, coupled with a notably high median score in the line placement metric. We illustrate that our method offers a straightforward means of assessing the quality of the camera's field of view, achieving a classification accuracy of 83.8\%. This metric can serve as a proxy for evaluating the potential performance of video and image quality applications.
On-Off Pattern Encoding and Path-Count Encoding as Deep Neural Network Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Understanding the encoded representation of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has been a fundamental yet challenging objective. In this work, we focus on two possible directions for analyzing representations of DNNs by studying simple image classification tasks. Specifically, we consider \textit{On-Off pattern} and \textit{PathCount} for investigating how information is stored in deep representations. On-off pattern of a neuron is decided as `on' or `off' depending on whether the neuron's activation after ReLU is non-zero or zero. PathCount is the number of paths that transmit non-zero energy from the input to a neuron. We investigate how neurons in the network encodes information by replacing each layer's activation with On-Off pattern or PathCount and evaluating its effect on classification performance. We also examine correlation between representation and PathCount. Finally, we show a possible way to improve an existing DNN interpretation method, Class Activation Map (CAM), by directly utilizing On-Off or PathCount.
Port-Hamiltonian Neural ODE Networks on Lie Groups For Robot Dynamics Learning and Control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Accurate models of robot dynamics are critical for safe and stable control and generalization to novel operational conditions. Hand-designed models, however, may be insufficiently accurate, even after careful parameter tuning. This motivates the use of machine learning techniques to approximate the robot dynamics over a training set of state-control trajectories. The dynamics of many robots are described in terms of their generalized coordinates on a matrix Lie group, e.g. on $SE(3)$ for ground, aerial, and underwater vehicles, and generalized velocity, and satisfy conservation of energy principles. This paper proposes a port-Hamiltonian formulation over a Lie group of the structure of a neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) network to approximate the robot dynamics. In contrast to a black-box ODE network, our formulation embeds energy conservation principle and Lie group's constraints in the dynamics model and explicitly accounts for energy-dissipation effect such as friction and drag forces in the dynamics model. We develop energy shaping and damping injection control for the learned, potentially under-actuated Hamiltonian dynamics to enable a unified approach for stabilization and trajectory tracking with various robot platforms.
Handling Large-scale Cardinality in building recommendation systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Effective recommendation systems rely on capturing user preferences, often requiring incorporating numerous features such as universally unique identifiers (UUIDs) of entities. However, the exceptionally high cardinality of UUIDs poses a significant challenge in terms of model degradation and increased model size due to sparsity. This paper presents two innovative techniques to address the challenge of high cardinality in recommendation systems. Specifically, we propose a bag-of-words approach, combined with layer sharing, to substantially decrease the model size while improving performance. Our techniques were evaluated through offline and online experiments on Uber use cases, resulting in promising results demonstrating our approach's effectiveness in optimizing recommendation systems and enhancing their overall performance.
Towards Scalable and Robust Model Versioning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

As the deployment of deep learning models continues to expand across industries, the threat of malicious incursions aimed at gaining access to these deployed models is on the rise. Should an attacker gain access to a deployed model, whether through server breaches, insider attacks, or model inversion techniques, they can then construct white-box adversarial attacks to manipulate the model's classification outcomes, thereby posing significant risks to organizations that rely on these models for critical tasks. Model owners need mechanisms to protect themselves against such losses without the necessity of acquiring fresh training data - a process that typically demands substantial investments in time and capital. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of generating multiple versions of a model that possess different attack properties, without acquiring new training data or changing model architecture. The model owner can deploy one version at a time and replace a leaked version immediately with a new version. The newly deployed model version can resist adversarial attacks generated leveraging white-box access to one or all previously leaked versions. We show theoretically that this can be accomplished by incorporating parameterized hidden distributions into the model training data, forcing the model to learn task-irrelevant features uniquely defined by the chosen data. Additionally, optimal choices of hidden distributions can produce a sequence of model versions capable of resisting compound transferability attacks over time. Leveraging our analytical insights, we design and implement a practical model versioning method for DNN classifiers, which leads to significant robustness improvements over existing methods. We believe our work presents a promising direction for safeguarding DNN services beyond their initial deployment.
User Study: Comparison of Picture Passwords and Current Login Approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

In this research, we conduct a user study that compares different computer/system authentication methods. More specifically, we look into comparing regular password authentication with picture authentication. Picture authentication means selecting a sequence of pictures from a set of pictures (30). We present users with both interfaces; various metrics are tracked while the participants conduct a variety of user authentication-related tasks. Other metrics include user perception of security with such technologies.
Integrating Graceful Degradation and Recovery through Requirement-driven Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are subject to environmental uncertainties such as adverse operating conditions, malicious attacks, and hardware degradation. These uncertainties may lead to failures that put the system in a sub-optimal or unsafe state. Systems that are resilient to such uncertainties rely on two types of operations: (1) graceful degradation, to ensure that the system maintains an acceptable level of safety during unexpected environmental conditions and (2) recovery, to facilitate the resumption of normal system functions. Typically, mechanisms for degradation and recovery are developed independently from each other, and later integrated into a system, requiring the designer to develop an additional, ad-hoc logic for activating and coordinating between the two operations. In this paper, we propose a self-adaptation approach for improving system resiliency through automated triggering and coordination of graceful degradation and recovery. The key idea behind our approach is to treat degradation and recovery as requirement-driven adaptation tasks: Degradation can be thought of as temporarily weakening original (i.e., ideal) system requirements to be achieved by the system, and recovery as strengthening the weakened requirements when the environment returns within an expected operating boundary. Furthermore, by treating weakening and strengthening as dual operations, we argue that a single requirement-based adaptation method is sufficient to enable coordination between degradation and recovery. Given system requirements specified in signal temporal logic (STL), we propose a run-time adaptation framework that performs degradation and recovery in response to environmental changes. We describe a prototype implementation of our framework and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach using a case study in unmanned underwater vehicles.
Instance Brownian Bridge as Texts for Open-vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Temporally locating objects with arbitrary class texts is the primary pursuit of open-vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation (VIS). Because of the insufficient vocabulary of video data, previous methods leverage image-text pretraining model for recognizing object instances by separately aligning each frame and class texts, ignoring the correlation between frames. As a result, the separation breaks the instance movement context of videos, causing inferior alignment between video and text. To tackle this issue, we propose to link frame-level instance representations as a Brownian Bridge to model instance dynamics and align bridge-level instance representation to class texts for more precisely open-vocabulary VIS (BriVIS). Specifically, we build our system upon a frozen video segmentor to generate frame-level instance queries, and design Temporal Instance Resampler (TIR) to generate queries with temporal context from frame queries. To mold instance queries to follow Brownian bridge and accomplish alignment with class texts, we design Bridge-Text Alignment (BTA) to learn discriminative bridge-level representations of instances via contrastive objectives. Setting MinVIS as the basic video segmentor, BriVIS surpasses the Open-vocabulary SOTA (OV2Seg) by a clear margin. For example, on the challenging large-vocabulary VIS dataset (BURST), BriVIS achieves 7.43 mAP and exhibits 49.49% improvement compared to OV2Seg (4.97 mAP).
Hijacking Attacks against Neural Networks by Analyzing Training Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Backdoors and adversarial examples are the two primary threats currently faced by deep neural networks (DNNs). Both attacks attempt to hijack the model behaviors with unintended outputs by introducing (small) perturbations to the inputs. Backdoor attacks, despite the high success rates, often require a strong assumption, which is not always easy to achieve in reality. Adversarial example attacks, which put relatively weaker assumptions on attackers, often demand high computational resources, yet do not always yield satisfactory success rates when attacking mainstream black-box models in the real world. These limitations motivate the following research question: can model hijacking be achieved more simply, with a higher attack success rate and more reasonable assumptions? In this paper, we propose CleanSheet, a new model hijacking attack that obtains the high performance of backdoor attacks without requiring the adversary to tamper with the model training process. CleanSheet exploits vulnerabilities in DNNs stemming from the training data. Specifically, our key idea is to treat part of the clean training data of the target model as "poisoned data," and capture the characteristics of these data that are more sensitive to the model (typically called robust features) to construct "triggers." These triggers can be added to any input example to mislead the target model, similar to backdoor attacks. We validate the effectiveness of CleanSheet through extensive experiments on 5 datasets, 79 normally trained models, 68 pruned models, and 39 defensive models. Results show that CleanSheet exhibits performance comparable to state-of-the-art backdoor attacks, achieving an average attack success rate (ASR) of 97.5% on CIFAR-100 and 92.4% on GTSRB, respectively. Furthermore, CleanSheet consistently maintains a high ASR, when confronted with various mainstream backdoor defenses.
Applications of Machine Learning to Optimizing Polyolefin Manufacturing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This chapter is a preprint from our book by , focusing on leveraging machine learning (ML) in chemical and polyolefin manufacturing optimization. It's crafted for both novices and seasoned professionals keen on the latest ML applications in chemical processes. We trace the evolution of AI and ML in chemical industries, delineate core ML components, and provide resources for ML beginners. A detailed discussion on various ML methods is presented, covering regression, classification, and unsupervised learning techniques, with performance metrics and examples. Ensemble methods, deep learning networks, including MLP, DNNs, RNNs, CNNs, and transformers, are explored for their growing role in chemical applications. Practical workshops guide readers through predictive modeling using advanced ML algorithms. The chapter culminates with insights into science-guided ML, advocating for a hybrid approach that enhances model accuracy. The extensive bibliography offers resources for further research and practical implementation. This chapter aims to be a thorough primer on ML's practical application in chemical engineering, particularly for polyolefin production, and sets the stage for continued learning in subsequent chapters. Please cite the original work [169,170] when referencing.
Generation of weighted trees, block trees and block graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2024
Year: 2024

We present a general framework to generate trees every vertex of which has a non-negative weight and a color. The colors are used to impose certain restrictions on the weight and colors of other vertices. We first extend the enumeration algorithms of unweighted trees given in [19, 20] to generate weighted trees that allow zero weight. We avoid isomorphisms by generalizing the concept of centroids to weighted trees and then using the so-called centroid-rooted canonical weighted trees. We provide a time complexity analysis of unranking algorithms and also show that the output delay complexity of enumeration is linear. The framework can be used to generate graph classes taking advantage of their tree-based decompositions/representations. We demonstrate our framework by generating weighted block trees which are in one-to-one correspondence with connected block graphs. All connected block graphs up to 19 vertices are publicly available at [1].
Robotic Test Tube Rearrangement Using Combined Reinforcement Learning and Motion Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

A combined task-level reinforcement learning and motion planning framework is proposed in this paper to address a multi-class in-rack test tube rearrangement problem. At the task level, the framework uses reinforcement learning to infer a sequence of swap actions while ignoring robotic motion details. At the motion level, the framework accepts the swapping action sequences inferred by task-level agents and plans the detailed robotic pick-and-place motion. The task and motion-level planning form a closed loop with the help of a condition set maintained for each rack slot, which allows the framework to perform replanning and effectively find solutions in the presence of low-level failures. Particularly for reinforcement learning, the framework leverages a distributed deep Q-learning structure with the Dueling Double Deep Q Network (D3QN) to acquire near-optimal policies and uses an A${}^\star$-based post-processing technique to amplify the collected training data. The D3QN and distributed learning help increase training efficiency. The post-processing helps complete unfinished action sequences and remove redundancy, thus making the training data more effective. We carry out both simulations and real-world studies to understand the performance of the proposed framework. The results verify the performance of the RL and post-processing and show that the closed-loop combination improves robustness. The framework is ready to incorporate various sensory feedback. The real-world studies also demonstrated the incorporation.
A Fast, Performant, Secure Distributed Training Framework For Large Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The distributed (federated) LLM is an important method for co-training the domain-specific LLM using siloed data. However, maliciously stealing model parameters and data from the server or client side has become an urgent problem to be solved. In this paper, we propose a secure distributed LLM based on model slicing. In this case, we deploy the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) on both the client and server side, and put the fine-tuned structure (LoRA or embedding of P-tuning v2) into the TEE. Then, secure communication is executed in the TEE and general environments through lightweight encryption. In order to further reduce the equipment cost as well as increase the model performance and accuracy, we propose a split fine-tuning scheme. In particular, we split the LLM by layers and place the latter layers in a server-side TEE (the client does not need a TEE). We then combine the proposed Sparsification Parameter Fine-tuning (SPF) with the LoRA part to improve the accuracy of the downstream task. Numerous experiments have shown that our method guarantees accuracy while maintaining security.
All in How You Ask for It: Simple Black-Box Method for Jailbreak Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, encounter `jailbreak' challenges, wherein safeguards are circumvented to generate ethically harmful prompts. This study introduces a straightforward black-box method for efficiently crafting jailbreak prompts, addressing the significant complexity and computational costs associated with conventional methods. Our technique iteratively transforms harmful prompts into benign expressions directly utilizing the target LLM, predicated on the hypothesis that LLMs can autonomously generate expressions that evade safeguards. Through experiments conducted with ChatGPT (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) and Gemini-Pro, our method consistently achieved an attack success rate exceeding 80% within an average of five iterations for forbidden questions and proved robust against model updates. The jailbreak prompts generated were not only naturally-worded and succinct but also challenging to defend against. These findings suggest that the creation of effective jailbreak prompts is less complex than previously believed, underscoring the heightened risk posed by black-box jailbreak attacks.
Enhancing Small Object Encoding in Deep Neural Networks: Introducing Fast&Focused-Net with Volume-wise Dot Product Layer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we introduce Fast&Focused-Net, a novel deep neural network architecture tailored for efficiently encoding small objects into fixed-length feature vectors. Contrary to conventional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Fast&Focused-Net employs a series of our newly proposed layer, the Volume-wise Dot Product (VDP) layer, designed to address several inherent limitations of CNNs. Specifically, CNNs often exhibit a smaller effective receptive field than their theoretical counterparts, limiting their vision span. Additionally, the initial layers in CNNs produce low-dimensional feature vectors, presenting a bottleneck for subsequent learning. Lastly, the computational overhead of CNNs, particularly in capturing diverse image regions by parameter sharing, is significantly high. The VDP layer, at the heart of Fast&Focused-Net, aims to remedy these issues by efficiently covering the entire image patch information with reduced computational demand. Experimental results demonstrate the prowess of Fast&Focused-Net in a variety of applications. For small object classification tasks, our network outperformed state-of-the-art methods on datasets such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, STL-10, SVHN-Cropped, and Fashion-MNIST. In the context of larger image classification, when combined with a transformer encoder (ViT), Fast&Focused-Net produced competitive results for OpenImages V6, ImageNet-1K, and Places365 datasets. Moreover, the same combination showcased unparalleled performance in text recognition tasks across SVT, IC15, SVTP, and HOST datasets. This paper presents the architecture, the underlying motivation, and extensive empirical evidence suggesting that Fast&Focused-Net is a promising direction for efficient and focused deep learning.