bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Knowledge-Bridged Causal Interaction Network for Causal Emotion Entailment
Authors: Zhao Weixiang , Zhao Yanyan , Li Zhuojun , Qin Bing
Published: June 2023

Causal Emotion Entailment aims to identify causal utterances that are responsible for the target utterance with a non-neutral emotion in conversations. Previous works are limited in thorough understanding of the conversational context and accurate reasoning of the emotion cause. To this end, we propose Knowledge-Bridged Causal Interaction Network (KBCIN) with commonsense knowledge (CSK) leveraged as three bridges. Specifically, we construct a conversational graph for each conversation and leverage the event-centered CSK as the semantics-level bridge (S-bridge) to capture the deep inter-utterance dependencies in the conversational context via the CSK-Enhanced Graph Attention module. Moreover, social-interaction CSK serves as emotion-level bridge (E-bridge) and action-level bridge (A-bridge) to connect candidate utterances with the target one, which provides explicit causal clues for the Emotional Interaction module and Actional Interaction module to reason the target emotion. Experimental results show that our model achieves better performance over most baseline models. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/circle-hit/KBCIN.
Towards Learning to Discover Money Laundering Sub-network in Massive Transaction Network
Authors: Chai Ziwei , Yang Yang , Dan Jiawang , Tian Sheng , Meng Changhua , Wang Weiqiang , Sun Yifei
Published: June 2023

Anti-money laundering (AML) systems play a critical role in safeguarding global economy. As money laundering is considered as one of the top group crimes, there is a crucial need to discover money laundering sub-network behind a particular money laundering transaction for a robust AML system. However, existing rule-based methods for money laundering sub-network discovery is heavily based on domain knowledge and may lag behind the modus operandi of launderers. Therefore, in this work, we first address the money laundering sub-network discovery problem with a neural network based approach, and propose an AML framework AMAP equipped with an adaptive sub-network proposer. In particular, we design an adaptive sub-network proposer guided by a supervised contrastive loss to discriminate money laundering transactions from massive benign transactions. We conduct extensive experiments on real-word datasets in AliPay of Ant Group. The result demonstrates the effectiveness of our AMAP in both money laundering transaction detection and money laundering sub-network discovering. The learned framework which yields money laundering sub-network from massive transaction network leads to a more comprehensive risk coverage and a deeper insight to money laundering strategies.
Robust Planning over Restless Groups: Engagement Interventions for a Large-Scale Maternal Telehealth Program
Authors: Killian Jackson A. , Biswas Arpita , Xu Lily , Verma Shresth , Nair Vineet , Taneja Aparna , Hegde Aparna , Madhiwalla Neha , Rodriguez Diaz Paula , Johnson-Yu Sonja , Tambe Milind
Published: June 2023

In 2020, maternal mortality in India was estimated to be as high as 130 deaths per 100K live births, nearly twice the UN's target. To improve health outcomes, the non-profit ARMMAN sends automated voice messages to expecting and new mothers across India. However, 38% of mothers stop listening to these calls, missing critical preventative care information. To improve engagement, ARMMAN employs health workers to intervene by making service calls, but workers can only call a fraction of the 100K enrolled mothers. Partnering with ARMMAN, we model the problem of allocating limited interventions across mothers as a restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB), where the realities of large scale and model uncertainty present key new technical challenges. We address these with GROUPS, a double oracle–based algorithm for robust planning in RMABs with scalable grouped arms. Robustness over grouped arms requires several methodological advances. First, to adversarially select stochastic group dynamics, we develop a new method to optimize Whittle indices over transition probability intervals. Second, to learn group-level RMAB policy best responses to these adversarial environments, we introduce a weighted index heuristic. Third, we prove a key theoretical result that planning over grouped arms achieves the same minimax regret--optimal strategy as planning over individual arms, under a technical condition. Finally, using real-world data from ARMMAN, we show that GROUPS produces robust policies that reduce minimax regret by up to 50%, halving the number of preventable missed voice messages to connect more mothers with life-saving maternal health information.
AirFormer: Predicting Nationwide Air Quality in China with Transformers
Authors: Liang Yuxuan , Xia Yutong , Ke Songyu , Wang Yiwei , Wen Qingsong , Zhang Junbo , Zheng Yu , Zimmermann Roger
Published: June 2023

Air pollution is a crucial issue affecting human health and livelihoods, as well as one of the barriers to economic growth. Forecasting air quality has become an increasingly important endeavor with significant social impacts, especially in emerging countries. In this paper, we present a novel Transformer termed AirFormer to predict nationwide air quality in China, with an unprecedented fine spatial granularity covering thousands of locations. AirFormer decouples the learning process into two stages: 1) a bottom-up deterministic stage that contains two new types of self-attention mechanisms to efficiently learn spatio-temporal representations; 2) a top-down stochastic stage with latent variables to capture the intrinsic uncertainty of air quality data. We evaluate AirFormer with 4-year data from 1,085 stations in Chinese Mainland. Compared to prior models, AirFormer reduces prediction errors by 5%∼8% on 72-hour future predictions. Our source code is available at https://github.com/yoshall/airformer.
Interpretable Chirality-Aware Graph Neural Network for Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship Modeling in Drug Discovery
Authors: Liu Yunchao (Lance) , Wang Yu , Vu Oanh , Moretti Rocco , Bodenheimer Bobby , Meiler Jens , Derr Tyler
Published: June 2023

In computer-aided drug discovery, quantitative structure activity relation models are trained to predict biological activity from chemical structure. Despite the recent success of applying graph neural network to this task, important chemical information such as molecular chirality is ignored. To fill this crucial gap, we propose Molecular-Kernel Graph NeuralNetwork (MolKGNN) for molecular representation learning, which features SE(3)-/conformation invariance, chirality-awareness, and interpretability. For our MolKGNN, we first design a molecular graph convolution to capture the chemical pattern by comparing the atom's similarity with the learnable molecular kernels. Furthermore, we propagate the similarity score to capture the higher-order chemical pattern. To assess the method, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation with nine well-curated datasets spanning numerous important drug targets that feature realistic high class imbalance and it demonstrates the superiority of MolKGNN over other graph neural networks in computer-aided drug discovery. Meanwhile, the learned kernels identify patterns that agree with domain knowledge, confirming the pragmatic interpretability of this approach. Our code and supplementary material are publicly available at https://github.com/meilerlab/MolKGNN.
Bugs in the Data: How ImageNet Misrepresents Biodiversity
Authors: Luccioni Alexandra Sasha , Rolnick David
Published: June 2023

ImageNet-1k is a dataset often used for benchmarking machine learning (ML) models and evaluating tasks such as image recognition and object detection. Wild animals make up 27% of ImageNet-1k but, unlike classes representing people and objects, these data have not been closely scrutinized. In the current paper, we analyze the 13,450 images from 269 classes that represent wild animals in the ImageNet-1k validation set, with the participation of expert ecologists. We find that many of the classes are ill-defined or overlapping, and that 12% of the images are incorrectly labeled, with some classes having >90% of images incorrect. We also find that both the wildlife-related labels and images included in ImageNet-1k present significant geographical and cultural biases, as well as ambiguities such as artificial animals, multiple species in the same image, or the presence of humans. Our findings highlight serious issues with the extensive use of this dataset for evaluating ML systems, the use of such algorithms in wildlife-related tasks, and more broadly the ways in which ML datasets are commonly created and curated.
Privacy-Preserved Evolutionary Graph Modeling via Gromov-Wasserstein Autoregression
Authors: Xiang Yue , Luo Dixin , Xu Hongteng
Published: June 2023

Real-world graphs like social networks are often evolutionary over time, whose observations at different timestamps lead to graph sequences. Modeling such evolutionary graphs is important for many applications, but solving this problem often requires the correspondence between the graphs at different timestamps, which may leak private node information, e.g., the temporal behavior patterns of the nodes. We proposed a Gromov-Wasserstein Autoregressive (GWAR) model to capture the generative mechanisms of evolutionary graphs, which does not require the correspondence information and thus preserves the privacy of the graphs' nodes. This model consists of two autoregressions, predicting the number of nodes and the probabilities of nodes and edges, respectively. The model takes observed graphs as its input and predicts future graphs via solving a joint graph alignment and merging task. This task leads to a fused Gromov-Wasserstein (FGW) barycenter problem, in which we approximate the alignment of the graphs based on a novel inductive fused Gromov-Wasserstein (IFGW) distance. The IFGW distance is parameterized by neural networks and can be learned under mild assumptions, thus, we can infer the FGW barycenters without iterative optimization and predict future graphs efficiently. Experiments show that our GWAR achieves encouraging performance in modeling evolutionary graphs in privacy-preserving scenarios.
Auto-CM: Unsupervised Deep Learning for Satellite Imagery Composition and Cloud Masking Using Spatio-Temporal Dynamics
Authors: Xie Yiqun , Li Zhili , Bao Han , Jia Xiaowei , Xu Dongkuan , Zhou Xun , Skakun Sergii
Published: June 2023

Cloud masking is both a fundamental and a critical task in the vast majority of Earth observation problems across social sectors, including agriculture, energy, water, etc. The sheer volume of satellite imagery to be processed has fast-climbed to a scale (e.g., >10 PBs/year) that is prohibitive for manual processing. Meanwhile, generating reliable cloud masks and image composite is increasingly challenging due to the continued distribution-shifts in the imagery collected by existing sensors and the ever-growing variety of sensors and platforms. Moreover, labeled samples are scarce and geographically limited compared to the needs in real large-scale applications. In related work, traditional remote sensing methods are often physics-based and rely on special spectral signatures from multi- or hyper-spectral bands, which are often not available in data collected by many -- and especially more recent -- high-resolution platforms. Machine learning and deep learning based methods, on the other hand, often require large volumes of up-to-date training data to be reliable and generalizable over space. We propose an autonomous image composition and masking (Auto-CM) framework to learn to solve the fundamental tasks in a label-free manner, by leveraging different dynamics of events in both geographic domains and time-series. Our experiments show that Auto-CM outperforms existing methods on a wide-range of data with different satellite platforms, geographic regions and bands.
Future Aware Pricing and Matching for Sustainable On-Demand Ride Pooling
Authors: Zhang Xianjie , Varakantham Pradeep , Jiang Hao
Published: June 2023

The popularity of on-demand ride pooling is owing to the benefits offered to customers (lower prices), taxi drivers (higher revenue), environment (lower carbon footprint due to fewer vehicles) and aggregation companies like Uber (higher revenue). To achieve these benefits, two key interlinked challenges have to be solved effectively: (a) pricing -- setting prices to customer requests for taxis; and (b) matching -- assignment of customers (that accepted the prices) to taxis/cars. Traditionally, both these challenges have been studied individually and using myopic approaches (considering only current requests), without considering the impact of current matching on addressing future requests. In this paper, we develop a novel framework that handles the pricing and matching problems together, while also considering the future impact of the pricing and matching decisions. In our experimental results on a real-world taxi dataset, we demonstrate that our framework can significantly improve revenue (up to 17% and on average 6.4%) in a sustainable manner by reducing the number of vehicles (up to 14% and on average 10.6%) required to obtain a given fixed revenue and the overall distance travelled by vehicles (up to 11.1% and on average 3.7%). That is to say, we are able to provide an ideal win-win scenario for all stakeholders (customers, drivers, aggregator, environment) involved by obtaining higher revenue for customers, drivers, aggregator (ride pooling company) while being good for the environment (due to fewer number of vehicles on the road and lesser fuel consumed).
A Crowd-AI Collaborative Duo Relational Graph Learning Framework towards Social Impact Aware Photo Classification
Authors: Zhang Yang , Kou Ziyi , Shang Lanyu , Zeng Huimin , Yue Zhenrui , Wang Dong
Published: June 2023

In artificial intelligence (AI), negative social impact (NSI) represents the negative effect on the society as a result of mistakes conducted by AI agents. While the photo classification problem has been widely studied in the AI community, the NSI made by photo misclassification is largely ignored due to the lack of quantitative measurements of the NSI and effective approaches to reduce it. In this paper, we focus on an NSI-aware photo classification problem where the goal is to develop a novel crowd-AI collaborative learning framework that leverages online crowd workers to quantitatively estimate and effectively reduce the NSI of misclassified photos. Our problem is motivated by the limitations of current NSI-aware photo classification approaches that either 1) cannot accurately estimate NSI because they simply model NSI as the semantic difference between true and misclassified categories or 2) require costly human annotations to estimate NSI of pairwise class categories. To address such limitations, we develop SocialCrowd, a crowdsourcing-based NSI-aware photo classification framework that explicitly reduces the NSI of photo misclassification by designing a duo relational NSI-aware graph with the NSI estimated by online crowd workers. The evaluation results on two large-scale image datasets show that SocialCrowd not only reduces the NSI of photo misclassification but also improves the classification accuracy on both datasets.
Implicit Bilevel Optimization: Differentiating through Bilevel Optimization Programming
Authors: Alesiani Francesco
Published: June 2023

Bilevel Optimization Programming is used to model complex and conflicting interactions between agents, for example in Robust AI or Privacy preserving AI. Integrating bilevel mathematical programming within deep learning is thus an essential objective for the Machine Learning community.
Previously proposed approaches only consider single-level programming. In this paper, we extend existing single-level optimization programming approaches and thus propose Differentiating through Bilevel Optimization Programming (BiGrad) for end-to-end learning of models that use Bilevel Programming as a layer.
BiGrad has wide applicability and can be used in modern machine learning frameworks. BiGrad is applicable to both continuous and combinatorial Bilevel optimization problems. We describe a class of gradient estimators for the combinatorial case which reduces the requirements in terms of computation complexity; for the case of the continuous variable, the gradient computation takes advantage of the push-back approach (i.e. vector-jacobian product) for an efficient implementation. Experiments show that the BiGrad successfully extends existing single-level approaches to Bilevel Programming.
Robust-by-Design Classification via Unitary-Gradient Neural Networks
Authors: Brau Fabio , Rossolini Giulio , Biondi Alessandro , Buttazzo Giorgio
Published: June 2023

The use of neural networks in safety-critical systems requires safe and robust models, due to the existence of adversarial attacks. Knowing the minimal adversarial perturbation of any input x, or, equivalently, knowing the distance of x from the classification boundary, allows evaluating the classification robustness, providing certifiable predictions. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art techniques for computing such a distance are computationally expensive and hence not suited for online applications. This work proposes a novel family of classifiers, namely Signed Distance Classifiers (SDCs), that, from a theoretical perspective, directly output the exact distance of x from the classification boundary, rather than a probability score (e.g., SoftMax). SDCs represent a family of robust-by-design classifiers. To practically address the theoretical requirements of an SDC, a novel network architecture named Unitary-Gradient Neural Network is presented. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture approximates a signed distance classifier, hence allowing an online certifiable classification of x at the cost of a single inference.
Similarity Distribution Based Membership Inference Attack on Person Re-identification
Authors: Gao Junyao , Jiang Xinyang , Zhang Huishuai , Yang Yifan , Dou Shuguang , Li Dongsheng , Miao Duoqian , Deng Cheng , Zhao Cairong
Published: June 2023

While person Re-identification (Re-ID) has progressed rapidly due to its wide real-world applications, it also causes severe risks of leaking personal information from training data. Thus, this paper focuses on quantifying this risk by membership inference (MI) attack. Most of the existing MI attack algorithms focus on classification models, while Re-ID follows a totally different training and inference paradigm. Re-ID is a fine-grained recognition task with complex feature embedding, and model outputs commonly used by existing MI like logits and losses are not accessible during inference. Since Re-ID focuses on modelling the relative relationship between image pairs instead of individual semantics, we conduct a formal and empirical analysis which validates that the distribution shift of the inter-sample similarity between training and test set is a critical criterion for Re-ID membership inference. As a result, we propose a novel membership inference attack method based on the inter-sample similarity distribution. Specifically, a set of anchor images are sampled to represent the similarity distribution conditioned on a target image, and a neural network with a novel anchor selection module is proposed to predict the membership of the target image. Our experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on both the Re-ID task and conventional classification task.
CodeAttack: Code-Based Adversarial Attacks for Pre-trained Programming Language Models
Authors: Jha Akshita , Reddy Chandan K.
Published: June 2023

Pre-trained programming language (PL) models (such as CodeT5, CodeBERT, GraphCodeBERT, etc.,) have the potential to automate software engineering tasks involving code understanding and code generation. However, these models operate in the natural channel of code, i.e., primarily concerned with the human understanding of code. They are not robust to changes in the input and thus, are potentially susceptible to adversarial attacks in the natural channel. We propose, Code Attack, a simple yet effective black-box attack model that uses code structure to generate effective, efficient, and imperceptible adversarial code samples and demonstrates the vulnerabilities of the state-of-the-art PL models to code-specific adversarial attacks. We evaluate the transferability of CodeAttack on several code-code (translation and repair) and code-NL (summarization) tasks across different programming languages. Code Attack outperforms state-of-the-art adversarial NLP attack models to achieve the best overall drop in performance while being more efficient, imperceptible, consistent, and fluent. The code can be found at https://github.com/reddy-lab-code-research/CodeAttack.
Heuristic Search in Dual Space for Constrained Fixed-Horizon POMDPs with Durative Actions
Authors: Khonji Majid , Khalifa Duoaa
Published: June 2023

The Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) is widely used in probabilistic planning for stochastic domains. However, current extensions, such as constrained and chance-constrained POMDPs, have limitations in modeling real-world planning problems because they assume that all actions have a fixed duration. To address this issue, we propose a unified model that encompasses durative POMDP and its constrained extensions. To solve the durative POMDP and its constrained extensions, we first convert them into an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation. This approach leverages existing solvers in the ILP literature and provides a foundation for solving these problems. We then introduce a heuristic search approach that prunes the search space, which is guided by solving successive partial ILP programs. Our empirical evaluation results show that our approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art fixed-horizon chance-constrained POMDP solver.
Robust Image Steganography: Hiding Messages in Frequency Coefficients
Authors: Lan Yuhang , Shang Fei , Yang Jianhua , Kang Xiangui , Li Enping
Published: June 2023

Steganography is a technique that hides secret messages into a public multimedia object without raising suspicion from third parties. However, most existing works cannot provide good robustness against lossy JPEG compression while maintaining a relatively large embedding capacity. This paper presents an end-to-end robust steganography system based on the invertible neural network (INN). Instead of hiding in the spatial domain, our method directly hides secret messages into the discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients of the cover image, which significantly improves the robustness and anti-steganalysis security. A mutual information loss is first proposed to constrain the flow of information in INN. Besides, a two-way fusion module (TWFM) is implemented, utilizing spatial and DCT domain features as auxiliary information to facilitate message extraction. These two designs aid in recovering secret messages from the DCT coefficients losslessly. Experimental results demonstrate that our method yields significantly lower error rates than other existing hiding methods. For example, our method achieves reliable extraction with 0 error rate for 1 bit per pixel (bpp) embedding payload; and under the JPEG compression with quality factor QF=10, the error rate of our method is about 22% lower than the state-of-the-art robust image hiding methods, which demonstrates remarkable robustness against JPEG compression.
Quantization-Aware Interval Bound Propagation for Training Certifiably Robust Quantized Neural Networks
Authors: Lechner Mathias , Žikelić Đorđe , Chatterjee Krishnendu , Henzinger Thomas A. , Rus Daniela
Published: June 2023

We study the problem of training and certifying adversarially robust quantized neural networks (QNNs). Quantization is a technique for making neural networks more efficient by running them using low-bit integer arithmetic and is therefore commonly adopted in industry. Recent work has shown that floating-point neural networks that have been verified to be robust can become vulnerable to adversarial attacks after quantization, and certification of the quantized representation is necessary to guarantee robustness.
In this work, we present quantization-aware interval bound propagation (QA-IBP), a novel method for training robust QNNs.
Inspired by advances in robust learning of non-quantized networks, our training algorithm computes the gradient of an abstract representation of the actual network. Unlike existing approaches, our method can handle the discrete semantics of QNNs.
Based on QA-IBP, we also develop a complete verification procedure for verifying the adversarial robustness of QNNs, which is guaranteed to terminate and produce a correct answer. Compared to existing approaches, the key advantage of our verification procedure is that it runs entirely on GPU or other accelerator devices.
We demonstrate experimentally that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods and establish the new state-of-the-art for training and certifying the robustness of QNNs.
Monitoring Model Deterioration with Explainable Uncertainty Estimation via Non-parametric Bootstrap
Authors: Mougan Carlos , Nielsen Dan Saattrup
Published: June 2023

Monitoring machine learning models once they are deployed
is challenging. It is even more challenging to decide when
to retrain models in real-case scenarios when labeled data is
beyond reach, and monitoring performance metrics becomes
unfeasible. In this work, we use non-parametric bootstrapped
uncertainty estimates and SHAP values to provide explainable
uncertainty estimation as a technique that aims to monitor
the deterioration of machine learning models in deployment
environments, as well as determine the source of model deteri-
oration when target labels are not available. Classical methods
are purely aimed at detecting distribution shift, which can lead
to false positives in the sense that the model has not deterio-
rated despite a shift in the data distribution. To estimate model
uncertainty we construct prediction intervals using a novel
bootstrap method, which improves previous state-of-the-art
work. We show that both our model deterioration detection
system as well as our uncertainty estimation method achieve
better performance than the current state-of-the-art. Finally,
we use explainable AI techniques to gain an understanding
of the drivers of model deterioration. We release an open
source Python package, doubt, which implements our pro-
posed methods, as well as the code used to reproduce our
experiments.
Improving Training and Inference of Face Recognition Models via Random Temperature Scaling
Authors: Shang Lei , Huang Mouxiao , Shi Wu , Liu Yuchen , Liu Yang , Steven Wang , Sun Baigui , Xie Xuansong , Qiao Yu
Published: June 2023

Data uncertainty is commonly observed in the images for face recognition (FR). However, deep learning algorithms often make predictions with high confidence even for uncertain or irrelevant inputs. Intuitively, FR algorithms can benefit from both the estimation of uncertainty and the detection of out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. Taking a probabilistic view of the current classification model, the temperature scalar is exactly the scale of uncertainty noise implicitly added in the softmax function. Meanwhile, the uncertainty of images in a dataset should follow a prior distribution. Based on the observation, a unified framework for uncertainty modeling and FR, Random Temperature Scaling (RTS), is proposed to learn a reliable FR algorithm. The benefits of RTS are two-fold. (1) In the training phase, it can adjust the learning strength of clean and noisy samples for stability and accuracy. (2) In the test phase, it can provide a score of confidence to detect uncertain, low-quality and even OOD samples, without training on extra labels. Extensive experiments on FR benchmarks demonstrate that the magnitude of variance in RTS, which serves as an OOD detection metric, is closely related to the uncertainty of the input image. RTS can achieve top performance on both the FR and OOD detection tasks. Moreover, the model trained with RTS can perform robustly on datasets with noise. The proposed module is light-weight and only adds negligible computation cost to the model.
Improving Robust Fariness via Balance Adversarial Training
Authors: Sun Chunyu , Xu Chenye , Yao Chengyuan , Liang Siyuan , Wu Yichao , Liang Ding , Liu Xianglong , Liu Aishan
Published: June 2023

Adversarial training (AT) methods are effective against adversarial attacks, yet they introduce severe disparity of accuracy and robustness between different classes, known as the robust fairness problem. Previously proposed Fair Robust Learning (FRL) adaptively reweights different classes to improve fairness. However, the performance of the better-performed classes decreases, leading to a strong performance drop. In this paper, we observed two unfair phenomena during adversarial training: different difficulties in generating adversarial examples from each class (source-class fairness) and disparate target class tendencies when generating adversarial examples (target-class fairness). From the observations, we propose Balance Adversarial Training (BAT) to address the robust fairness problem. Regarding source-class fairness, we adjust the attack strength and difficulties of each class to generate samples near the decision boundary for easier and fairer model learning; considering target-class fairness, by introducing a uniform distribution constraint, we encourage the adversarial example generation process for each class with a fair tendency. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNette) demonstrate that our BAT can significantly outperform other baselines in mitigating the robust fairness problem (+5-10\% on the worst class accuracy)(Our codes can be found at https://github.com/silvercherry/Improving-Robust-Fairness-via-Balance-Adversarial-Training).
HOTCOLD Block: Fooling Thermal Infrared Detectors with a Novel Wearable Design
Authors: Wei Hui , Wang Zhixiang , Jia Xuemei , Zheng Yinqiang , Tang Hao , Satoh Shin'ichi , Wang Zheng
Published: June 2023

Adversarial attacks on thermal infrared imaging expose the risk of related applications. Estimating the security of these systems is essential for safely deploying them in the real world. In many cases, realizing the attacks in the physical space requires elaborate special perturbations. These solutions are often impractical and attention-grabbing. To address the need for a physically practical and stealthy adversarial attack, we introduce HotCold Block, a novel physical attack for infrared detectors that hide persons utilizing the wearable Warming Paste and Cooling Paste. By attaching these readily available temperature-controlled materials to the body, HotCold Block evades human eyes efficiently. Moreover, unlike existing methods that build adversarial patches with complex texture and structure features, HotCold Block utilizes an SSP-oriented adversarial optimization algorithm that enables attacks with pure color blocks and explores the influence of size, shape, and position on attack performance. Extensive experimental results in both digital and physical environments demonstrate the performance of our proposed HotCold Block. Code is available: https://github.com/weihui1308/HOTCOLDBlock.
Beyond NaN: Resiliency of Optimization Layers in the Face of Infeasibility
Authors: Wong Wai Tuck , Kinsey Sarah , Karunasena Ramesha , Nguyen Thanh H. , Sinha Arunesh
Published: June 2023

Prior work has successfully incorporated optimization layers as the last layer in neural networks for various problems, thereby allowing joint learning and planning in one neural network forward pass. In this work, we identify a weakness in such a set-up where inputs to the optimization layer lead to undefined output of the neural network. Such undefined decision outputs can lead to possible catastrophic outcomes in critical real time applications. We show that an adversary can cause such failures by forcing rank deficiency on the matrix fed to the optimization layer which results in the optimization failing to produce a solution. We provide a defense for the failure cases by controlling the condition number of the input matrix. We study the problem in the settings of synthetic data, Jigsaw Sudoku, and in speed planning for autonomous driving. We show that our proposed defense effectively prevents the framework from failing with undefined output. Finally, we surface a number of edge cases which lead to serious bugs in popular optimization solvers which can be abused as well.
Robustness to Spurious Correlations Improves Semantic Out-of-Distribution Detection
Authors: Zhang Lily H. , Ranganath Rajesh
Published: June 2023

Methods which utilize the outputs or feature representations of predictive models have emerged as promising approaches for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection of image inputs. However, as demonstrated in previous work, these methods struggle to detect OOD inputs that share nuisance values (e.g. background) with in-distribution inputs. The detection of shared-nuisance OOD (SN-OOD) inputs is particularly relevant in real-world applications, as anomalies and in-distribution inputs tend to be captured in the same settings during deployment. In this work, we provide a possible explanation for these failures and propose nuisance-aware OOD detection to address them. Nuisance-aware OOD detection substitutes a classifier trained via Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) with one that 1. approximates a distribution where the nuisance-label relationship is broken and 2. yields representations that are independent of the nuisance under this distribution, both marginally and conditioned on the label. We can train a classifier to achieve these objectives using Nuisance-Randomized Distillation (NuRD), an algorithm developed for OOD generalization under spurious correlations. Output- and feature-based nuisance-aware OOD detection perform substantially better than their original counterparts, succeeding even when detection based on domain generalization algorithms fails to improve performance.
Probabilistic Programs as an Action Description Language
Authors: Brafman Ronen I. , Tolpin David , Wertheim Or
Published: June 2023

Actions description languages (ADLs), such as STRIPS, PDDL, and RDDL specify the input format for planning algorithms. Unfortunately, their syntax is familiar to planning experts only, and not to potential users of planning technology. Moreover, this syntax limits the ability to describe complex and large domains. We argue that programming languages (PLs), and more specifically, probabilistic programming languages (PPLs), provide a more suitable alternative. PLs are familiar to all programmers, support complex data types and rich libraries for their manipulation, and have powerful constructs, such as loops, sub-routines, and local variables with which complex, realistic models and complex objectives can be simply and naturally specified. PPLs, specifically, make it easy to specify distributions, which is essential for stochastic models. The natural objection to this proposal is that PLs are opaque and too expressive, making reasoning about them difficult. However, PPLs also come with efficient inference algorithms, which, coupled with a growing body of work on sampling-based and gradient-based planning, imply that planning and execution monitoring can be carried out efficiently in practice. In this paper, we expand on this proposal, illustrating its potential with examples.
Probabilistic Reasoning and Learning for Trustworthy AI
Authors: Choi YooJung
Published: June 2023

As automated decision-making systems are increasingly deployed in areas with personal and societal impacts, there is a growing demand for artificial intelligence and machine learning systems that are fair, robust, interpretable, and generally trustworthy. Ideally we would wish to answer questions regarding these properties and provide guarantees about any automated system to be deployed in the real world. This raises the need for a unified language and framework under which we can reason about and develop trustworthy AI systems. This talk will discuss how tractable probabilistic reasoning and learning provides such framework.

It is important to note that guarantees regarding fairness, robustness, etc., hold with respect to the distribution of the world in which the decision-making system operates. For example, to see whether automated loan decisions are biased against certain gender, one may compare the average decision for each gender; this requires knowledge of how the features used in the decision are distributed for each gender. Moreover, there are inherent uncertainties in modeling this distribution, in addition to the uncertainties when deploying a system in the real world, such as missing or noisy information. We can handle such uncertainties in a principled way through probabilistic reasoning. Taking fairness-aware learning as an example, we can deal with biased labels in the training data by explicitly modeling the observed labels as being generated from some probabilistic process that injects bias/noise to hidden, fair labels, particularly in a way that best explains the observed data.

A key challenge that still needs to be addressed is that: we need models that can closely fit complex real-world distributions—i.e. expressive—while also being amenable to exact and efficient inference of probabilistic queries—i.e. tractable. I will show that probabilistic circuits, a family of tractable probabilistic models, offer both such benefits. In order to ultimately develop a common framework to study various areas of trustworthy AI (e.g., privacy, fairness, explanations, etc.), we need models that can flexibly answer different questions, even the ones it did not foresee. This talk will thus survey the efforts to expand the horizon of complex reasoning capabilities of probabilistic circuits, especially highlighted by a modular approach that answers various queries via a pipeline of a handful of simple tractable operations.
Planning and Learning for Reliable Autonomy in the Open World
Authors: Saisubramanian Sandhya
Published: June 2023

Safe and reliable decision-making is critical for long-term deployment of autonomous systems. Despite the recent advances in artificial intelligence, ensuring safe and reliable operation of human-aligned autonomous systems in open-world environments remains a challenge. My research focuses on developing planning and learning algorithms that support reliable autonomy in fully and partially observable environments, in the presence of uncertainty, limited information, and limited resources. This talk covers a summary of my recent research towards reliable autonomy.
Human-Aware AI – A Foundational Framework for Human-AI Interaction
Authors: Sreedharan Sarath
Published: June 2023

We are living through a revolutionary moment in AI history. We are seeing the development of impressive new AI systems at a rate that was unimaginable just a few years ago. However, AI's true potential to transform society remains unrealized, in no small part due to the inability of current systems to work effectively with people. A major hurdle to achieving such coordination is the inherent asymmetry between the AI system and its users. In this talk, I will discuss how the framework of Human-Aware AI (HAAI) provides us with the tools required to bridge this gap and support fluent and intuitive coordination between the AI system and its users.
The Analysis of Deep Neural Networks by Information Theory: From Explainability to Generalization
Authors: Yu Shujian
Published: June 2023

Despite their great success in many artificial intelligence tasks, deep neural networks (DNNs) still suffer from a few limitations, such as poor generalization behavior for out-of-distribution (OOD) data and the "black-box" nature. Information theory offers fresh insights to solve these challenges. In this short paper, we briefly review the recent developments in this area, and highlight our contributions.
Building Compositional Robot Autonomy with Modularity and Abstraction
Authors: Zhu Yuke
Published: June 2023

This paper summarizes my research roadmap for building compositional robot autonomy with the principles of modularity and abstraction.
Accurate Detection of Weld Seams for Laser Welding in Real-World Manufacturing
Authors: Ali Rabia , Sarmad Muhammad , Tayyub Jawad , Vogel Alexander
Published: June 2023

Welding is a fabrication process used to join or fuse two mechanical parts. Modern welding machines have automated lasers that follow a pre-defined weld seam path between the two parts to create a bond. Previous efforts have used simple computer vision edge detectors to automatically detect the weld seam edge on an image at the junction of two metals to be welded. However, these systems lack reliability and accuracy resulting in manual human verification of the detected edges. This paper presents a neural network architecture that automatically detects the weld seam edge between two metals with high accuracy. We augment this system with a pre-classifier that filters out anomalous workpieces (e.g., incorrect placement). Finally, we justify our design choices by evaluating against several existing deep network pipelines as well as proof through real-world use. We also describe in detail the process of deploying this system in a real-world shop floor including evaluation and monitoring. We make public a large, well-labeled laser seam dataset to perform deep learning-based edge detection in industrial settings.
Efficient Training of Large-Scale Industrial Fault Diagnostic Models through Federated Opportunistic Block Dropout
Authors: Chen Yuanyuan , Chen Zichen , Guo Sheng , Zhao Yansong , Liu Zelei , Wu Pengcheng , Yang Chengyi , Li Zengxiang , Yu Han
Published: June 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI)-empowered industrial fault diagnostics is important in ensuring the safe operation of industrial applications. Since complex industrial systems often involve multiple industrial plants (possibly belonging to different companies or subsidiaries) with sensitive data collected and stored in a distributed manner, collaborative fault diagnostic model training often needs to leverage federated learning (FL). As the scale of the industrial fault diagnostic models are often large and communication channels in such systems are often not exclusively used for FL model training, existing deployed FL model training frameworks cannot train such models efficiently across multiple institutions. In this paper, we report our experience developing and deploying the Federated Opportunistic Block Dropout (FedOBD) approach for industrial fault diagnostic model training. By decomposing large-scale models into semantic blocks and enabling FL participants to opportunistically upload selected important blocks in a quantized manner, it significantly reduces the communication overhead while maintaining model performance. Since its deployment in ENN Group in February 2022, FedOBD has served two coal chemical plants across two cities in China to build industrial fault prediction models. It helped the company reduce the training communication overhead by over 70% compared to its previous AI Engine, while maintaining model performance at over 85% test F1 score. To our knowledge, it is the first successfully deployed dropout-based FL approach.
OPRADI: Applying Security Game to Fight Drive under the Influence in Real-World
Authors: Yuan Luzhan , Wang Wei , Zhang Gaowei , Wang Yi
Published: June 2023

Driving under the influence (DUI) is one of the main causes of traffic accidents, often leading to severe life and property losses. Setting up sobriety checkpoints on certain roads is the most commonly used practice to identify DUI-drivers in many countries worldwide. However, setting up checkpoints according to the police's experiences may not be effective for ignoring the strategic interactions between the police and DUI-drivers, particularly when inspecting resources are limited. To remedy this situation, we adapt the classic Stackelberg security game (SSG) to a new SSG-DUI game to describe the strategic interactions in catching DUI-drivers. SSG-DUI features drivers' bounded rationality and social knowledge sharing among them, thus realizing improved real-world fidelity. With SSG-DUI, we propose OPRADI, a systematic approach for advising better strategies in setting up checkpoints. We perform extensive experiments to evaluate it in both simulated environments and real-world contexts, in collaborating with a Chinese city's police bureau. The results reveal its effectiveness in improving police's real-world operations, thus having significant practical potentials.
Context-Aware Analysis of Group Submissions for Group Anomaly Detection and Performance Prediction
Authors: Norouzi Narges , Mazaheri Amir
Published: June 2023

Learning exercises that activate students’ additional cognitive understanding of course concepts facilitate contextualizing the content knowledge and developing higher-order thinking and problem-solving skills. Student-generated instructional materials such as course summaries and problem sets are amongst the instructional strategies that reflect active learning and constructivist philosophy.

The contributions of this work are twofold: 1) We introduce a practical implementation of inside-outside learning strategy in an undergraduate deep learning course and will share our experiences in incorporating student-generated instructional materials learning strategy in course design, and 2) We develop a context-aware deep learning framework to draw insights from the student-generated materials for (i) Detecting anomalies in group activities and (ii) Predicting the median quiz performance of students in each group. This work opens up an avenue for effectively implementing a constructivism learning strategy in large-scale and online courses to build a sense of community between learners while providing an automated tool for instructors to identify at-risk groups.
Scratch for Sports: Athletic Drills as a Platform for Experiencing, Understanding, and Developing AI-Driven Apps
Authors: Kumar Vishesh , Worsley Marcelo
Published: June 2023

Culturally relevant and sustaining implementations of computing education are increasingly leveraging young learners' passion for sports as a platform for building interest in different STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) concepts. Numerous disciplines spanning physics, engineering, data science, and especially AI based computing are not only authentically used in professional sports in today's world, but can also be productively introduced to introduce young learnres to these disciplines and facilitate deep engagement with the same in the context of sports. In this work, we present a curriculum that includes a constellation of proprietary apps and tools we show student athletes learning sports like basketball and soccer that use AI methods like pose detection and IMU-based gesture detection to track activity and provide feedback. We also share Scratch extensions which enable rich access to sports related pose, object, and gesture detection algorithms that youth can then tinker around with and develop their own sports drill applications. We present early findings from pilot implementations of portions of these tools and curricula, which also fostered discussion relating to the failings, risks, and social harms associated with many of these different AI methods – noticeable in professional sports contexts, and relevant to youths' lives as active users of AI technologies as well as potential future creators of the same.