OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Privacy-Utility Balanced Voice De-Identification Using Adversarial Examples
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Faced with the threat of identity leakage during voice data publishing, users are engaged in a privacy-utility dilemma when enjoying convenient voice services. Existing studies employ direct modification or text-based re-synthesis to de-identify users' voices, but resulting in inconsistent audibility in the presence of human participants. In this paper, we propose a voice de-identification system, which uses adversarial examples to balance the privacy and utility of voice services. Instead of typical additive examples inducing perceivable distortions, we design a novel convolutional adversarial example that modulates perturbations into real-world room impulse responses. Benefit from this, our system could preserve user identity from exposure by Automatic Speaker Identification (ASI) while remaining the voice perceptual quality for non-intrusive de-identification. Moreover, our system learns a compact speaker distribution through a conditional variational auto-encoder to sample diverse target embeddings on demand. Combining diverse target generation and input-specific perturbation construction, our system enables any-to-any identify transformation for adaptive de-identification. Experimental results show that our system could achieve 98% and 79% successful de-identification on mainstream ASIs and commercial systems with an objective Mel cepstral distortion of 4.31dB and a subjective mean opinion score of 4.48.
Towards Human-Centred Explainability Benchmarks For Text Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Progress on many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as text classification, is driven by objective, reproducible and scalable evaluation via publicly available benchmarks. However, these are not always representative of real-world scenarios where text classifiers are employed, such as sentiment analysis or misinformation detection. In this position paper, we put forward two points that aim to alleviate this problem. First, we propose to extend text classification benchmarks to evaluate the explainability of text classifiers. We review challenges associated with objectively evaluating the capabilities to produce valid explanations which leads us to the second main point: We propose to ground these benchmarks in human-centred applications, for example by using social media, gamification or to learn explainability metrics from human judgements.
HSGNet: Object Re-identification with Hierarchical Similarity Graph Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Object re-identification method is made up of backbone network, feature aggregation, and loss function. However, most backbone networks lack a special mechanism to handle rich scale variations and mine discriminative feature representations. In this paper, we firstly design a hierarchical similarity graph module (HSGM) to reduce the conflict of backbone and re-identification networks. The designed HSGM builds a rich hierarchical graph to mine the mapping relationships between global-local and local-local. Secondly, we divide the feature map along with the spatial and channel directions in each hierarchical graph. The HSGM applies the spatial features and channel features extracted from different locations as nodes, respectively, and utilizes the similarity scores between nodes to construct spatial and channel similarity graphs. During the learning process of HSGM, we utilize a learnable parameter to re-optimize the importance of each position, as well as evaluate the correlation between different nodes. Thirdly, we develop a novel hierarchical similarity graph network (HSGNet) by embedding the HSGM in the backbone network. Furthermore, HSGM can be easily embedded into backbone networks of any depth to improve object re-identification ability. Finally, extensive experiments on three large-scale object datasets demonstrate that the proposed HSGNet is superior to state-of-the-art object re-identification approaches.
SWTF: Sparse Weighted Temporal Fusion for Drone-Based Activity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Drone-camera based human activity recognition (HAR) has received significant attention from the computer vision research community in the past few years. A robust and efficient HAR system has a pivotal role in fields like video surveillance, crowd behavior analysis, sports analysis, and human-computer interaction. What makes it challenging are the complex poses, understanding different viewpoints, and the environmental scenarios where the action is taking place. To address such complexities, in this paper, we propose a novel Sparse Weighted Temporal Fusion (SWTF) module to utilize sparsely sampled video frames for obtaining global weighted temporal fusion outcome. The proposed SWTF is divided into two components. First, a temporal segment network that sparsely samples a given set of frames. Second, weighted temporal fusion, that incorporates a fusion of feature maps derived from optical flow, with raw RGB images. This is followed by base-network, which comprises a convolutional neural network module along with fully connected layers that provide us with activity recognition. The SWTF network can be used as a plug-in module to the existing deep CNN architectures, for optimizing them to learn temporal information by eliminating the need for a separate temporal stream. It has been evaluated on three publicly available benchmark datasets, namely Okutama, MOD20, and Drone-Action. The proposed model has received an accuracy of 72.76%, 92.56%, and 78.86% on the respective datasets thereby surpassing the previous state-of-the-art performances by a significant margin.
Debiasing Methods for Fairer Neural Models in Vision and Language Research: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Despite being responsible for state-of-the-art results in several computer vision and natural language processing tasks, neural networks have faced harsh criticism due to some of their current shortcomings. One of them is that neural networks are correlation machines prone to model biases within the data instead of focusing on actual useful causal relationships. This problem is particularly serious in application domains affected by aspects such as race, gender, and age. To prevent models from incurring on unfair decision-making, the AI community has concentrated efforts in correcting algorithmic biases, giving rise to the research area now widely known as fairness in AI. In this survey paper, we provide an in-depth overview of the main debiasing methods for fairness-aware neural networks in the context of vision and language research. We propose a novel taxonomy to better organize the literature on debiasing methods for fairness, and we discuss the current challenges, trends, and important future work directions for the interested researcher and practitioner.
Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning for Collaborative Data Sharing via Auto-encoder Latent Space Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Privacy-preserving machine learning in data-sharing processes is an ever-critical task that enables collaborative training of Machine Learning (ML) models without the need to share the original data sources. It is especially relevant when an organization must assure that sensitive data remains private throughout the whole ML pipeline, i.e., training and inference phases. This paper presents an innovative framework that uses Representation Learning via autoencoders to generate privacy-preserving embedded data. Thus, organizations can share the data representation to increase machine learning models' performance in scenarios with more than one data source for a shared predictive downstream task.
DC-Check: A Data-Centric AI checklist to guide the development of reliable machine learning systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

While there have been a number of remarkable breakthroughs in machine learning (ML), much of the focus has been placed on model development. However, to truly realize the potential of machine learning in real-world settings, additional aspects must be considered across the ML pipeline. Data-centric AI is emerging as a unifying paradigm that could enable such reliable end-to-end pipelines. However, this remains a nascent area with no standardized framework to guide practitioners to the necessary data-centric considerations or to communicate the design of data-centric driven ML systems. To address this gap, we propose DC-Check, an actionable checklist-style framework to elicit data-centric considerations at different stages of the ML pipeline: Data, Training, Testing, and Deployment. This data-centric lens on development aims to promote thoughtfulness and transparency prior to system development. Additionally, we highlight specific data-centric AI challenges and research opportunities. DC-Check is aimed at both practitioners and researchers to guide day-to-day development. As such, to easily engage with and use DC-Check and associated resources, we provide a DC-Check companion website (https://www.vanderschaar-lab.com/dc-check/). The website will also serve as an updated resource as methods and tooling evolve over time.
Heterogeneous Randomized Response for Differential Privacy in Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are susceptible to privacy inference attacks (PIAs), given their ability to learn joint representation from features and edges among nodes in graph data. To prevent privacy leakages in GNNs, we propose a novel heterogeneous randomized response (HeteroRR) mechanism to protect nodes' features and edges against PIAs under differential privacy (DP) guarantees without an undue cost of data and model utility in training GNNs. Our idea is to balance the importance and sensitivity of nodes' features and edges in redistributing the privacy budgets since some features and edges are more sensitive or important to the model utility than others. As a result, we derive significantly better randomization probabilities and tighter error bounds at both levels of nodes' features and edges departing from existing approaches, thus enabling us to maintain high data utility for training GNNs. An extensive theoretical and empirical analysis using benchmark datasets shows that HeteroRR significantly outperforms various baselines in terms of model utility under rigorous privacy protection for both nodes' features and edges. That enables us to defend PIAs in DP-preserving GNNs effectively.
No Privacy in the Electronics Repair Industry
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Electronics repair and service providers offer a range of services to computing device owners across North America -- from software installation to hardware repair. Device owners obtain these services and leave their device along with their access credentials at the mercy of technicians, which leads to privacy concerns for owners' personal data. We conduct a comprehensive four-part study to measure the state of privacy in the electronics repair industry. First, through a field study with 18 service providers, we uncover that most service providers do not have any privacy policy or controls to safeguard device owners' personal data from snooping by technicians. Second, we drop rigged devices for repair at 16 service providers and collect data on widespread privacy violations by technicians, including snooping on personal data, copying data off the device, and removing tracks of snooping activities. Third, we conduct an online survey (n=112) to collect data on customers' experiences when getting devices repaired. Fourth, we invite a subset of survey respondents (n=30) for semi-structured interviews to establish a deeper understanding of their experiences and identify potential solutions to curtail privacy violations by technicians. We apply our findings to discuss possible controls and actions different stakeholders and regulatory agencies should take to improve the state of privacy in the repair industry.
Turning disruptive power of Blockchain in the insurance market into innovative opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

Insurance has been around for more than centuries. This risk mitigation strategy has been utilized in maritime commerce as early thousand years ago, where Asian merchant seafarers were pooling together their wares in collective funds to pay for damages of individual capsized ship. In 2018, insurance industry made up 6 percent of global GDP while financial industry amounted to about 7 to 9 percent of the US GDP.2020, the industry net premiums totaled USD1.28 trillion, by 2030, blockchain insurance market value is estimated to reach USD39.5 Billion. Despite of growing reform, the insurance market is dominated by intermediaries assisting people to match their insurance needs. While many predictions focused on artificial intelligence, cloud computing, blockchain stands out as the most disruptive technology that can change the driving forces underlying the global economy. This paper presents a blockchain business use case and how insurance industry can turn blockchain disruptive power into innovative opportunities.
Optimal Condition Training for Target Source Separation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Recent research has shown remarkable performance in leveraging multiple extraneous conditional and non-mutually exclusive semantic concepts for sound source separation, allowing the flexibility to extract a given target source based on multiple different queries. In this work, we propose a new optimal condition training (OCT) method for single-channel target source separation, based on greedy parameter updates using the highest performing condition among equivalent conditions associated with a given target source. Our experiments show that the complementary information carried by the diverse semantic concepts significantly helps to disentangle and isolate sources of interest much more efficiently compared to single-conditioned models. Moreover, we propose a variation of OCT with condition refinement, in which an initial conditional vector is adapted to the given mixture and transformed to a more amenable representation for target source extraction. We showcase the effectiveness of OCT on diverse source separation experiments where it improves upon permutation invariant models with oracle assignment and obtains state-of-the-art performance in the more challenging task of text-based source separation, outperforming even dedicated text-only conditioned models.
Insonification Angle-based Ultrasound Volume Reconstruction for Spine Intervention
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2022
Year: 2022

Ultrasound-guided spine interventions, such as lumbar-puncture procedures, often suffer from the reduced visibility of key anatomical features such as the inter-spinous process space, due to the complex shape of the self-shadowing vertebra. Therefore, we propose to design a wearable 3D ultrasound device capable of imaging the vertebra from multiple insonification angles to improve the 3D bone surface visualization for interventional guidance. In this work, we aim to equip the imaging platform with a reconstruction algorithm taking advantage of the redundant ultrasound beam angles. Specifically, we try to weight each beam's contribution for the same reconstructed voxel during the reconstruction process based on its incidence angle to the estimated bone surface. To validate our approach, we acquired multi-angle ultrasound image data on a spine phantom with a tracked phased array transducer. The results show that with the proposed method the bone surface contrast can be significantly enhanced, providing clearer visual guidance for the clinician to perform spine intervention.
MF2-MVQA: A Multi-stage Feature Fusion method for Medical Visual Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

There is a key problem in the medical visual question answering task that how to effectively realize the feature fusion of language and medical images with limited datasets. In order to better utilize multi-scale information of medical images, previous methods directly embed the multi-stage visual feature maps as tokens of same size respectively and fuse them with text representation. However, this will cause the confusion of visual features at different stages. To this end, we propose a simple but powerful multi-stage feature fusion method, MF2-MVQA, which stage-wise fuses multi-level visual features with textual semantics. MF2-MVQA achieves the State-Of-The-Art performance on VQA-Med 2019 and VQA-RAD dataset. The results of visualization also verify that our model outperforms previous work.
Gradient Imitation Reinforcement Learning for General Low-Resource Information Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Information Extraction (IE) aims to extract structured information from heterogeneous sources. IE from natural language texts include sub-tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relation Extraction (RE), and Event Extraction (EE). Most IE systems require comprehensive understandings of sentence structure, implied semantics, and domain knowledge to perform well; thus, IE tasks always need adequate external resources and annotations. However, it takes time and effort to obtain more human annotations. Low-Resource Information Extraction (LRIE) strives to use unsupervised data, reducing the required resources and human annotation. In practice, existing systems either utilize self-training schemes to generate pseudo labels that will cause the gradual drift problem, or leverage consistency regularization methods which inevitably possess confirmation bias. To alleviate confirmation bias due to the lack of feedback loops in existing LRIE learning paradigms, we develop a Gradient Imitation Reinforcement Learning (GIRL) method to encourage pseudo-labeled data to imitate the gradient descent direction on labeled data, which can force pseudo-labeled data to achieve better optimization capabilities similar to labeled data. Based on how well the pseudo-labeled data imitates the instructive gradient descent direction obtained from labeled data, we design a reward to quantify the imitation process and bootstrap the optimization capability of pseudo-labeled data through trial and error. In addition to learning paradigms, GIRL is not limited to specific sub-tasks, and we leverage GIRL to solve all IE sub-tasks (named entity recognition, relation extraction, and event extraction) in low-resource settings (semi-supervised IE and few-shot IE).
MDFlow: Unsupervised Optical Flow Learning by Reliable Mutual Knowledge Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Recent works have shown that optical flow can be learned by deep networks from unlabelled image pairs based on brightness constancy assumption and smoothness prior. Current approaches additionally impose an augmentation regularization term for continual self-supervision, which has been proved to be effective on difficult matching regions. However, this method also amplify the inevitable mismatch in unsupervised setting, blocking the learning process towards optimal solution. To break the dilemma, we propose a novel mutual distillation framework to transfer reliable knowledge back and forth between the teacher and student networks for alternate improvement. Concretely, taking estimation of off-the-shelf unsupervised approach as pseudo labels, our insight locates at defining a confidence selection mechanism to extract relative good matches, and then add diverse data augmentation for distilling adequate and reliable knowledge from teacher to student. Thanks to the decouple nature of our method, we can choose a stronger student architecture for sufficient learning. Finally, better student prediction is adopted to transfer knowledge back to the efficient teacher without additional costs in real deployment. Rather than formulating it as a supervised task, we find that introducing an extra unsupervised term for multi-target learning achieves best final results. Extensive experiments show that our approach, termed MDFlow, achieves state-of-the-art real-time accuracy and generalization ability on challenging benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/ltkong218/MDFlow.
GET-DIPP: Graph-Embedded Transformer for Differentiable Integrated Prediction and Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Accurately predicting interactive road agents' future trajectories and planning a socially compliant and human-like trajectory accordingly are important for autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we propose a planning-centric prediction neural network, which takes surrounding agents' historical states and map context information as input, and outputs the joint multi-modal prediction trajectories for surrounding agents, as well as a sequence of control commands for the ego vehicle by imitation learning. An agent-agent interaction module along the time axis is proposed in our network architecture to better comprehend the relationship among all the other intelligent agents on the road. To incorporate the map's topological information, a Dynamic Graph Convolutional Neural Network (DGCNN) is employed to process the road network topology. Besides, the whole architecture can serve as a backbone for the Differentiable Integrated motion Prediction with Planning (DIPP) method by providing accurate prediction results and initial planning commands. Experiments are conducted on real-world datasets to demonstrate the improvements made by our proposed method in both planning and prediction accuracy compared to the previous state-of-the-art methods.
How Much Hate with #china? A Preliminary Analysis on China-related Hateful Tweets Two Years After the Covid Pandemic Began
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Following the outbreak of a global pandemic, online content is filled with hate speech. Donald Trump's ''Chinese Virus'' tweet shifted the blame for the spread of the Covid-19 virus to China and the Chinese people, which triggered a new round of anti-China hate both online and offline. This research intends to examine China-related hate speech on Twitter during the two years following the burst of the pandemic (2020 and 2021). Through Twitter's API, in total 2,172,333 tweets hashtagged #china posted during the time were collected. By employing multiple state-of-the-art pretrained language models for hate speech detection, we identify a wide range of hate of various types, resulting in an automatically labeled anti-China hate speech dataset. We identify a hateful rate in #china tweets of 2.5% in 2020 and 1.9% in 2021. This is well above the average rate of online hate speech on Twitter at 0.6% identified in Gao et al., 2017. We further analyzed the longitudinal development of #china tweets and those identified as hateful in 2020 and 2021 through visualizing the daily number and hate rate over the two years. Our keyword analysis of hate speech in #china tweets reveals the most frequently mentioned terms in the hateful #china tweets, which can be used for further social science studies.