OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Biometric Template Protection for Neural-Network-based Face Recognition Systems: A Survey of Methods and Evaluation Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

As automated face recognition applications tend towards ubiquity, there is a growing need to secure the sensitive face data used within these systems. This paper presents a survey of biometric template protection (BTP) methods proposed for securing face templates (images/features) in neural-network-based face recognition systems. The BTP methods are categorised into two types: Non-NN and NN-learned. Non-NN methods use a neural network (NN) as a feature extractor, but the BTP part is based on a non-NN algorithm, whereas NN-learned methods employ a NN to learn a protected template from the unprotected template. We present examples of Non-NN and NN-learned face BTP methods from the literature, along with a discussion of their strengths and weaknesses. We also investigate the techniques used to evaluate these methods in terms of the three most common BTP criteria: recognition accuracy, irreversibility, and renewability/unlinkability. The recognition accuracy of protected face recognition systems is generally evaluated using the same (empirical) techniques employed for evaluating standard (unprotected) biometric systems. However, most irreversibility and renewability/unlinkability evaluations are found to be based on theoretical assumptions/estimates or verbal implications, with a lack of empirical validation in a practical face recognition context. So, we recommend a greater focus on empirical evaluations to provide more concrete insights into the irreversibility and renewability/unlinkability of face BTP methods in practice. Additionally, an exploration of the reproducibility of the studied BTP works, in terms of the public availability of their implementation code and evaluation datasets/procedures, suggests that it would be difficult to faithfully replicate most of the reported findings. So, we advocate for a push towards reproducibility, in the hope of advancing face BTP research.
Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation via Regional Contrastive Consistency Regularization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation has been well-studied in recent years. However, most existing works largely neglect the local regional consistency across different domains and are less robust to changes in outdoor environments. In this paper, we propose a novel and fully end-to-end trainable approach, called regional contrastive consistency regularization (RCCR) for domain adaptive semantic segmentation. Our core idea is to pull the similar regional features extracted from the same location of different images, i.e., the original image and augmented image, to be closer, and meanwhile push the features from the different locations of the two images to be separated. We innovatively propose a region-wise contrastive loss with two sampling strategies to realize effective regional consistency. Besides, we present momentum projection heads, where the teacher projection head is the exponential moving average of the student. Finally, a memory bank mechanism is designed to learn more robust and stable region-wise features under varying environments. Extensive experiments on two common UDA benchmarks, i.e., GTAV to Cityscapes and SYNTHIA to Cityscapes, demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Evaluating generative networks using Gaussian mixtures of image features
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We develop a measure for evaluating the performance of generative networks given two sets of images. A popular performance measure currently used to do this is the Fréchet Inception Distance (FID). FID assumes that images featurized using the penultimate layer of Inception-v3 follow a Gaussian distribution, an assumption which cannot be violated if we wish to use FID as a metric. However, we show that Inception-v3 features of the ImageNet dataset are not Gaussian; in particular, every single marginal is not Gaussian. To remedy this problem, we model the featurized images using Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) and compute the 2-Wasserstein distance restricted to GMMs. We define a performance measure, which we call WaM, on two sets of images by using Inception-v3 (or another classifier) to featurize the images, estimate two GMMs, and use the restricted $2$-Wasserstein distance to compare the GMMs. We experimentally show the advantages of WaM over FID, including how FID is more sensitive than WaM to imperceptible image perturbations. By modelling the non-Gaussian features obtained from Inception-v3 as GMMs and using a GMM metric, we can more accurately evaluate generative network performance.
Data-driven approaches for predicting spread of infectious diseases through DINNs: Disease Informed Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In this work, we present an approach called Disease Informed Neural Networks (DINNs) that can be employed to effectively predict the spread of infectious diseases. This approach builds on a successful physics informed neural network approaches that have been applied to a variety of applications that can be modeled by linear and non-linear ordinary and partial differential equations. Specifically, we build on the application of PINNs to SIR compartmental models and expand it a scaffolded family of mathematical models describing various infectious diseases. We show how the neural networks are capable of learning how diseases spread, forecasting their progression, and finding their unique parameters (e.g. death rate). To demonstrate the robustness and efficacy of DINNs, we apply the approach to eleven highly infectious diseases that have been modeled in increasing levels of complexity. Our computational experiments suggest that DINNs is a reliable candidate for effectively learn about the dynamics of spread and forecast its progression into the future from available real-world data.
Mutual cooperation and tolerance to defection in the context of socialization: the theoretical model and experimental evidence
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

The study of the nature of human cooperation still contains gaps needing investigation. Previous findings reveal that socialization effectively promotes cooperation in the well-known Prisoner's dilemma (PD) game. However, theoretical concepts fail to describe high levels of cooperation (probability higher than 50%) that were observed empirically. In this paper, we derive a symmetrical quantal response equilibrium (QRE) in PD in Markov strategies and test it against experimental data. Our results indicate that for low levels of rationality, QRE manages to describe high cooperation. In contrast, for high rationality QRE converges to the Nash equilibrium and describes low-cooperation behavior of participants. In the area of middle rationality, QRE matches the curve that represents the set of Nash equilibrium in Markov strategies. Further, we find that QRE serves as a dividing line between behavior before and after socialization, according to the experimental data. Finally, we successfully highlight the theoretically-predicted intersection of the set of Nash equilibrium in Markov strategies and the QRE curve.
Next Period Recommendation Reality Check
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Over the past decade, tremendous progress has been made in Recommender Systems (RecSys) for well-known tasks such as next-item and next-basket prediction. On the other hand, the recently proposed next-period recommendation (NPR) task is not covered as much. Current works about NPR are mostly based around distinct problem formulations, methods, and proprietary datasets, making solutions difficult to reproduce. In this article, we aim to fill the gap in RecSys methods evaluation on the NPR task using publicly available datasets and (1) introduce the TTRS, a large-scale financial transactions dataset suitable for RecSys methods evaluation; (2) benchmark popular RecSys approaches on several datasets for the NPR task. When performing our analysis, we found a strong repetitive consumption pattern in several real-world datasets. With this setup, our results suggest that the repetitive nature of data is still hard to generalize for the evaluated RecSys methods, and novel item prediction performance is still questionable.
RWN: Robust Watermarking Network for Image Cropping Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Image cropping can be maliciously used to manipulate the layout of an image and alter the underlying meaning. Previous image crop detection schemes only predicts whether an image has been cropped, ignoring which part of the image is cropped. This paper presents a novel robust watermarking network (RWN) for image crop localization. We train an anti-crop processor (ACP) that embeds a watermark into a target image. The visually indistinguishable protected image is then posted on the social network instead of the original image. At the recipient's side, ACP extracts the watermark from the attacked image, and we conduct feature matching on the original and extracted watermark to locate the position of the crop in the original image plane. We further extend our scheme to detect tampering attack on the attacked image. Besides, we explore a simple yet efficient method (JPEG-Mixup) to improve the generalization of JPEG robustness. According to our comprehensive experiments, RWN is the first to provide high-accuracy and robust image crop localization. Besides, the accuracy of tamper detection is comparable with many state-of-the-art passive-based methods.
LightSeq2: Accelerated Training for Transformer-based Models on GPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Transformer-based neural models are used in many AI applications. Training these models is expensive, as it takes huge GPU resources and long duration. It is challenging because typical data like sentences have variable lengths, and Transformer's computation patterns are more complex than convolutional neural networks. Existing systems either only focus on model inference or optimization for only BERT-like encoder models. In this paper, we present LightSeq2, a system to accelerate training for a general family of Transformer models on GPUs. We propose a series of GPU optimization techniques tailored to the specific computation flow and memory access patterns of Transformer models. LightSeq2 supports many model architectures, including BERT (encoder-only), GPT (decoder-only), Transformer (encoder-decoder), and vision Transformer. Our experiments for a variety of models and benchmarks show that LightSeq2 is consistently faster (1.4-3.5x) than previous systems on different GPUs. In particular, it gains 308% training speedup compared with existing systems on a large public machine translation benchmark (WMT14 English-German).
Aspect-driven User Preference and News Representation Learning for News Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

News recommender systems are essential for helping users to efficiently and effectively find out those interesting news from a large amount of news. Most of existing news recommender systems usually learn topic-level representations of users and news for recommendation, and neglect to learn more informative aspect-level features of users and news for more accurate recommendation. As a result, they achieve limited recommendation performance. Aiming at addressing this deficiency, we propose a novel Aspect-driven News Recommender System (ANRS) built on aspect-level user preference and news representation learning. Here, news aspect is fine-grained semantic information expressed by a set of related words, which indicates specific aspects described by the news. In ANRS, news aspect-level encoder and user aspect-level encoder are devised to learn the fine-grained aspect-level representations of user's preferences and news characteristics respectively, which are fed into click predictor to judge the probability of the user clicking the candidate news. Extensive experiments are done on the commonly used real-world dataset MIND, which demonstrate the superiority of our method compared with representative and state-of-the-art methods.
Adapting TTS models For New Speakers using Transfer Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Training neural text-to-speech (TTS) models for a new speaker typically requires several hours of high quality speech data. Prior works on voice cloning attempt to address this challenge by adapting pre-trained multi-speaker TTS models for a new voice, using a few minutes of speech data of the new speaker. However, publicly available large multi-speaker datasets are often noisy, thereby resulting in TTS models that are not suitable for use in products. We address this challenge by proposing transfer-learning guidelines for adapting high quality single-speaker TTS models for a new speaker, using only a few minutes of speech data. We conduct an extensive study using different amounts of data for a new speaker and evaluate the synthesized speech in terms of naturalness and voice/style similarity to the target speaker. We find that fine-tuning a single-speaker TTS model on just 30 minutes of data, can yield comparable performance to a model trained from scratch on more than 27 hours of data for both male and female target speakers.
Federated Phish Bowl: LSTM-Based Decentralized Phishing Email Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

With increasingly more sophisticated phishing campaigns in recent years, phishing emails lure people using more legitimate-looking personal contexts. To tackle this problem, instead of traditional heuristics-based algorithms, more adaptive detection systems such as natural language processing (NLP)-powered approaches are essential to understanding phishing text representations. Nevertheless, concerns surrounding the collection of phishing data that might cover confidential information hinder the effectiveness of model learning. We propose a decentralized phishing email detection framework called Federated Phish Bowl (FedPB) which facilitates collaborative phishing detection with privacy. In particular, we devise a knowledge-sharing mechanism with federated learning (FL). Using long short-term memory (LSTM) for phishing detection, the framework adapts by sharing a global word embedding matrix across the clients, with each client running its local model with Non-IID data. We collected the most recent phishing samples to study the effectiveness of the proposed method using different client numbers and data distributions. The results show that FedPB can attain a competitive performance with a centralized phishing detector, with generality to various cases of FL retaining a prediction accuracy of 83%.
Benchmarking the Robustness of Spatial-Temporal Models Against Corruptions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The state-of-the-art deep neural networks are vulnerable to common corruptions (e.g., input data degradations, distortions, and disturbances caused by weather changes, system error, and processing). While much progress has been made in analyzing and improving the robustness of models in image understanding, the robustness in video understanding is largely unexplored. In this paper, we establish a corruption robustness benchmark, Mini Kinetics-C and Mini SSV2-C, which considers temporal corruptions beyond spatial corruptions in images. We make the first attempt to conduct an exhaustive study on the corruption robustness of established CNN-based and Transformer-based spatial-temporal models. The study provides some guidance on robust model design and training: Transformer-based model performs better than CNN-based models on corruption robustness; the generalization ability of spatial-temporal models implies robustness against temporal corruptions; model corruption robustness (especially robustness in the temporal domain) enhances with computational cost and model capacity, which may contradict the current trend of improving the computational efficiency of models. Moreover, we find the robustness intervention for image-related tasks (e.g., training models with noise) may not work for spatial-temporal models.
EditVAE: Unsupervised Part-Aware Controllable 3D Point Cloud Shape Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

This paper tackles the problem of parts-aware point cloud generation. Unlike existing works which require the point cloud to be segmented into parts a priori, our parts-aware editing and generation are performed in an unsupervised manner. We achieve this with a simple modification of the Variational Auto-Encoder which yields a joint model of the point cloud itself along with a schematic representation of it as a combination of shape primitives. In particular, we introduce a latent representation of the point cloud which can be decomposed into a disentangled representation for each part of the shape. These parts are in turn disentangled into both a shape primitive and a point cloud representation, along with a standardising transformation to a canonical coordinate system. The dependencies between our standardising transformations preserve the spatial dependencies between the parts in a manner that allows meaningful parts-aware point cloud generation and shape editing. In addition to the flexibility afforded by our disentangled representation, the inductive bias introduced by our joint modeling approach yields state-of-the-art experimental results on the ShapeNet dataset.
CasSeqGCN: Combining Network Structure and Temporal Sequence to Predict Information Cascades
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

One important task in the study of information cascade is to predict the future recipients of a message given its past spreading trajectory. While the network structure serves as the backbone of the spreading, an accurate prediction can hardly be made without the knowledge of the dynamics on the network. The temporal information in the spreading sequence captures many hidden features, but predictions based on sequence alone have their limitations. Recent efforts start to explore the possibility of combining both the network structure and the temporal feature. Here, we propose a new end-to-end prediction method CasSeqGCN in which the structure and temporal feature are simultaneously taken into account. A cascade is divided into multiple snapshots which record the network topology and the state of nodes. The graph convolutional network (GCN) is used to learn the representation of a snapshot. A novel aggregation method based on dynamic routing is proposed to aggregate node representation and the long short-term memory (LSTM) model is used to extract temporal information. CasSeqGCN predicts the future cascade size more accurately compared with other state-of-art baseline methods. The ablation study demonstrates that the improvement mainly comes from the design of the input and the GCN layer. We explicitly design an experiment to show the quality of the cascade representation learned by our approach is better than other methods. Our work proposes a new approach to combine the structural and temporal features, which not only gives a useful baseline model for future studies of cascade prediction, but also brings new insights on a wide collection of problems related with dynamics on and of the network.
Extending Environments To Measure Self-Reflection In Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

We consider an extended notion of reinforcement learning in which the environment can simulate the agent and base its outputs on the agent's hypothetical behavior. Since good performance usually requires paying attention to whatever things the environment's outputs are based on, we argue that for an agent to achieve on-average good performance across many such extended environments, it is necessary for the agent to self-reflect. Thus weighted-average performance over the space of all suitably well-behaved extended environments could be considered a way of measuring how self-reflective an agent is. We give examples of extended environments and introduce a simple transformation which experimentally seems to increase some standard RL agents' performance in a certain type of extended environment.
Semantics-aware Attention Improves Neural Machine Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

The integration of syntactic structures into Transformer machine translation has shown positive results, but to our knowledge, no work has attempted to do so with semantic structures. In this work we propose two novel parameter-free methods for injecting semantic information into Transformers, both rely on semantics-aware masking of (some of) the attention heads. One such method operates on the encoder, through a Scene-Aware Self-Attention (SASA) head. Another on the decoder, through a Scene-Aware Cross-Attention (SACrA) head. We show a consistent improvement over the vanilla Transformer and syntax-aware models for four language pairs. We further show an additional gain when using both semantic and syntactic structures in some language pairs.
Improving the Robustness to Variations of Objects and Instructions with a Neuro-Symbolic Approach for Interactive Instruction Following
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

An interactive instruction following task has been proposed as a benchmark for learning to map natural language instructions and first-person vision into sequences of actions to interact with objects in 3D environments. We found that an existing end-to-end neural model for this task tends to fail to interact with objects of unseen attributes and follow various instructions. We assume that this problem is caused by the high sensitivity of neural feature extraction to small changes in vision and language inputs. To mitigate this problem, we propose a neuro-symbolic approach that utilizes high-level symbolic features, which are robust to small changes in raw inputs, as intermediate representations. We verify the effectiveness of our model with the subtask evaluation on the ALFRED benchmark. Our experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms the end-to-end neural model by 9, 46, and 74 points in the success rate on the ToggleObject, PickupObject, and SliceObject subtasks in unseen environments respectively.
Variance Minimization in the Wasserstein Space for Invariant Causal Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Selecting powerful predictors for an outcome is a cornerstone task for machine learning. However, some types of questions can only be answered by identifying the predictors that causally affect the outcome. A recent approach to this causal inference problem leverages the invariance property of a causal mechanism across differing experimental environments (Peters et al., 2016; Heinze-Deml et al., 2018). This method, invariant causal prediction (ICP), has a substantial computational defect -- the runtime scales exponentially with the number of possible causal variables. In this work, we show that the approach taken in ICP may be reformulated as a series of nonparametric tests that scales linearly in the number of predictors. Each of these tests relies on the minimization of a novel loss function -- the Wasserstein variance -- that is derived from tools in optimal transport theory and is used to quantify distributional variability across environments. We prove under mild assumptions that our method is able to recover the set of identifiable direct causes, and we demonstrate in our experiments that it is competitive with other benchmark causal discovery algorithms.