pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Warfare:Breaking the Watermark Protection of AI-Generated Content
Authors: Guanlin Li, Yifei Chen, Jie Zhang, Shangwei Guo, Han Qiu, Guoyin Wang, Jiwei Li, Tianwei Zhang
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

AI-Generated Content (AIGC) is rapidly expanding, with services using advanced generative models to create realistic images and fluent text. Regulating such content is crucial to prevent policy violations, such as unauthorized commercialization or unsafe content distribution. Watermarking is a promising solution for content attribution and verification, but we demonstrate its vulnerability to two key attacks: (1) Watermark removal, where adversaries erase embedded marks to evade regulation, and (2) Watermark forging, where they generate illicit content with forged watermarks, leading to misattribution. We propose Warfare, a unified attack framework leveraging a pre-trained diffusion model for content processing and a generative adversarial network for watermark manipulation. Evaluations across datasets and embedding setups show that Warfare achieves high success rates while preserving content quality. We further introduce Warfare-Plus, which enhances efficiency without compromising effectiveness. The code can be found in https://github.com/GuanlinLee/warfare.
AI Algorithm for the Generation of Three-Dimensional Accessibility Ramps in Grasshopper / Rhinoceros 7
Authors: Antonio Li, Leila Yi, Brandon Yeo Pei Hui
Date: 2023-09-29 00:00:00

Often overlooked as a component of urban development, accessibility infrastructure is undeniably crucial in daily life. Accessibility ramps are one of the most common types of accessibility infrastructure, and serve to benefit not only people with mobile impairments but also able-bodied third parties. While the necessity of accessibility ramps is acknowledged, actual implementation fails in light of the limits of manpower required for the design stage. In response, we present an algorithm capable of the automatic generation of a feasible accessibility ramp based on a 3D model of the relevant environment. Through the manual specification of initial and terminal points within a 3D model, the algorithm uses AI search algorithms to determine the optimal pathway connecting these points. Essential components in devising a wheelchair-accessible ramp are encoded within the process, as evaluated by the algorithm, including but not limited to elevation differentials, spatial constraints, and gradient specifications. From this, the algorithm then generates the pathway to be expanded into a full-scale, usable model of a ramp, which then can be easily exported and transformed through inter-software exchanges. Though some human input is still required following the generation stage, the minimising of human resources provides significant boosts of efficiency in the design process thus lowering the threshold for the incorporation of accessibility features in future urban design.
Trajectory-aware Principal Manifold Framework for Data Augmentation and Image Generation
Authors: Elvis Han Cui, Bingbin Li, Yanan Li, Weng Kee Wong, Donghui Wang
Date: 2023-07-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Image Generation

Data augmentation for deep learning benefits model training, image transformation, medical imaging analysis and many other fields. Many existing methods generate new samples from a parametric distribution, like the Gaussian, with little attention to generate samples along the data manifold in either the input or feature space. In this paper, we verify that there are theoretical and practical advantages of using the principal manifold hidden in the feature space than the Gaussian distribution. We then propose a novel trajectory-aware principal manifold framework to restore the manifold backbone and generate samples along a specific trajectory. On top of the autoencoder architecture, we further introduce an intrinsic dimension regularization term to make the manifold more compact and enable few-shot image generation. Experimental results show that the novel framework is able to extract more compact manifold representation, improve classification accuracy and generate smooth transformation among few samples.
Automatic Identification of Stone-Handling Behaviour in Japanese Macaques Using LabGym Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Théo Ardoin, Cédric Sueur
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00

The latest advancements in artificial intelligence technology have opened doors to the analysis of intricate behaviours. In light of this, ethologists are actively exploring the potential of these innovations to streamline the time-intensive process of behavioural analysis using video data. In the realm of primatology, several tools have been developed for this purpose. Nonetheless, each of these tools grapples with technical constraints that we aim to surmount. To address these limitations, we have established a comprehensive protocol designed to harness the capabilities of a cutting-edge tool, LabGym. Our primary objective was to evaluate LabGym's suitability for the analysis of primate behaviour, with a focus on Japanese macaques as our model subjects. We have successfully developed a model that demonstrates a high degree of accuracy in detecting Japanese macaques stone-handling behaviour. Our behavioural analysis model was completed as per our initial expectations and LabGym succeed to recognise stone-handling behaviour on videos. However, it is important to note that our study's ability to draw definitive conclusions regarding the quality of the behavioural analysis is hampered by the absence of quantitative data within the specified timeframe. Nevertheless, our model represents the pioneering endeavour, as far as our knowledge extends, in leveraging LabGym for the analysis of primate behaviours. It lays the groundwork for potential future research in this promising field.
Equitable and Fair Performance Evaluation of Whale Optimization Algorithm
Authors: Bryar A. Hassan, Tarik A. Rashid, Aram Ahmed, Shko M. Qader, Jaffer Majidpour, Mohmad Hussein Abdalla, Noor Tayfor, Hozan K. Hamarashid, Haval Sidqi, Kaniaw A. Noori
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00

It is essential that all algorithms are exhaustively, somewhat, and intelligently evaluated. Nonetheless, evaluating the effectiveness of optimization algorithms equitably and fairly is not an easy process for various reasons. Choosing and initializing essential parameters, such as the size issues of the search area for each method and the number of iterations required to reduce the issues, might be particularly challenging. As a result, this chapter aims to contrast the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) with the most recent algorithms on a selected set of benchmark problems with varying benchmark function hardness scores and initial control parameters comparable problem dimensions and search space. When solving a wide range of numerical optimization problems with varying difficulty scores, dimensions, and search areas, the experimental findings suggest that WOA may be statistically superior or inferior to the preceding algorithms referencing convergence speed, running time, and memory utilization.
Extreme Image Transformations Facilitate Robust Latent Object Representations
Authors: Girik Malik, Dakarai Crowder, Ennio Mingolla
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, Memorization, Object, Object Recognition

Adversarial attacks can affect the object recognition capabilities of machines in wild. These can often result from spurious correlations between input and class labels, and are prone to memorization in large networks. While networks are expected to do automated feature selection, it is not effective at the scale of the object. Humans, however, are able to select the minimum set of features required to form a robust representation of an object. In this work, we show that finetuning any pretrained off-the-shelf network with Extreme Image Transformations (EIT) not only helps in learning a robust latent representation, it also improves the performance of these networks against common adversarial attacks of various intensities. Our EIT trained networks show strong activations in the object regions even when tested with more intense noise, showing promising generalizations across different kinds of adversarial attacks.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Cyber Defence: A Survey
Authors: Gregory Palmer, Chris Parry, Daniel J. B. Harrold, Chris Willis
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Real-Time Strategy Games, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Survey

The rapid increase in the number of cyber-attacks in recent years raises the need for principled methods for defending networks against malicious actors. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has emerged as a promising approach for mitigating these attacks. However, while DRL has shown much potential for cyber defence, numerous challenges must be overcome before DRL can be applied to the autonomous cyber defence (ACD) problem at scale. Principled methods are required for environments that confront learners with very high-dimensional state spaces, large multi-discrete action spaces, and adversarial learning. Recent works have reported success in solving these problems individually. There have also been impressive engineering efforts towards solving all three for real-time strategy games. However, applying DRL to the full ACD problem remains an open challenge. Here, we survey the relevant DRL literature and conceptualize an idealised ACD-DRL agent. We provide: i.) A summary of the domain properties that define the ACD problem; ii.) A comprehensive comparison of current ACD environments used for benchmarking DRL approaches; iii.) An overview of state-of-the-art approaches for scaling DRL to domains that confront learners with the curse of dimensionality, and; iv.) A survey and critique of current methods for limiting the exploitability of agents within adversarial settings from the perspective of ACD. We conclude with open research questions that we hope will motivate future directions for researchers and practitioners working on ACD.
Promoting Robustness of Randomized Smoothing: Two Cost-Effective Approaches
Authors: Linbo Liu, Trong Nghia Hoang, Lam M. Nguyen, Tsui-Wei Weng
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Randomized smoothing has recently attracted attentions in the field of adversarial robustness to provide provable robustness guarantees on smoothed neural network classifiers. However, existing works show that vanilla randomized smoothing usually does not provide good robustness performance and often requires (re)training techniques on the base classifier in order to boost the robustness of the resulting smoothed classifier. In this work, we propose two cost-effective approaches to boost the robustness of randomized smoothing while preserving its clean performance. The first approach introduces a new robust training method AdvMacerwhich combines adversarial training and robustness certification maximization for randomized smoothing. We show that AdvMacer can improve the robustness performance of randomized smoothing classifiers compared to SOTA baselines, while being 3x faster to train than MACER baseline. The second approach introduces a post-processing method EsbRS which greatly improves the robustness certificate based on building model ensembles. We explore different aspects of model ensembles that has not been studied by prior works and propose a novel design methodology to further improve robustness of the ensemble based on our theoretical analysis.
Using Spark Machine Learning Models to Perform Predictive Analysis on Flight Ticket Pricing Data
Authors: Philip Wong, Phue Thant, Pratiksha Yadav, Ruta Antaliya, Jongwook Woo
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance

This paper discusses predictive performance and processes undertaken on flight pricing data utilizing r2(r-square) and RMSE that leverages a large dataset, originally from Expedia.com, consisting of approximately 20 million records or 4.68 gigabytes. The project aims to determine the best models usable in the real world to predict airline ticket fares for non-stop flights across the US. Therefore, good generalization capability and optimized processing times are important measures for the model. We will discover key business insights utilizing feature importance and discuss the process and tools used for our analysis. Four regression machine learning algorithms were utilized: Random Forest, Gradient Boost Tree, Decision Tree, and Factorization Machines utilizing Cross Validator and Training Validator functions for assessing performance and generalization capability.
FedSym: Unleashing the Power of Entropy for Benchmarking the Algorithms for Federated Learning
Authors: Ensiye Kiyamousavi, Boris Kraychev, Ivan Koychev
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Diversity, Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a decentralized machine learning approach where independent learners process data privately. Its goal is to create a robust and accurate model by aggregating and retraining local models over multiple rounds. However, FL faces challenges regarding data heterogeneity and model aggregation effectiveness. In order to simulate real-world data, researchers use methods for data partitioning that transform a dataset designated for centralized learning into a group of sub-datasets suitable for distributed machine learning with different data heterogeneity. In this paper, we study the currently popular data partitioning techniques and visualize their main disadvantages: the lack of precision in the data diversity, which leads to unreliable heterogeneity indexes, and the inability to incrementally challenge the FL algorithms. To resolve this problem, we propose a method that leverages entropy and symmetry to construct 'the most challenging' and controllable data distributions with gradual difficulty. We introduce a metric to measure data heterogeneity among the learning agents and a transformation technique that divides any dataset into splits with precise data diversity. Through a comparative study, we demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing FL data partitioning approaches, showcasing its potential to challenge model aggregation algorithms. Experimental results indicate that our approach gradually challenges the FL strategies, and the models trained on FedSym distributions are more distinct.
Measuring Feature Sparsity in Language Models
Authors: Mingyang Deng, Lucas Tao, Joe Benton
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Recent works have proposed that activations in language models can be modelled as sparse linear combinations of vectors corresponding to features of input text. Under this assumption, these works aimed to reconstruct feature directions using sparse coding. We develop metrics to assess the success of these sparse coding techniques and test the validity of the linearity and sparsity assumptions. We show our metrics can predict the level of sparsity on synthetic sparse linear activations, and can distinguish between sparse linear data and several other distributions. We use our metrics to measure levels of sparsity in several language models. We find evidence that language model activations can be accurately modelled by sparse linear combinations of features, significantly more so than control datasets. We also show that model activations appear to be sparsest in the first and final layers.
Observatory: Characterizing Embeddings of Relational Tables
Authors: Tianji Cong, Madelon Hulsebos, Zhenjie Sun, Paul Groth, H. V. Jagadish
Date: 2023-10-05 00:00:00

Language models and specialized table embedding models have recently demonstrated strong performance on many tasks over tabular data. Researchers and practitioners are keen to leverage these models in many new application contexts; but limited understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of these models, and the table representations they generate, makes the process of finding a suitable model for a given task reliant on trial and error. There is an urgent need to gain a comprehensive understanding of these models to minimize inefficiency and failures in downstream usage. To address this need, we propose Observatory, a formal framework to systematically analyze embedding representations of relational tables. Motivated both by invariants of the relational data model and by statistical considerations regarding data distributions, we define eight primitive properties, and corresponding measures to quantitatively characterize table embeddings for these properties. Based on these properties, we define an extensible framework to evaluate language and table embedding models. We collect and synthesize a suite of datasets and use Observatory to analyze nine such models. Our analysis provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of learned representations over tables. We find, for example, that some models are sensitive to table structure such as column order, that functional dependencies are rarely reflected in embeddings, and that specialized table embedding models have relatively lower sample fidelity. Such insights help researchers and practitioners better anticipate model behaviors and select appropriate models for their downstream tasks, while guiding researchers in the development of new models.
Spiral-Elliptical automated galaxy morphology classification from telescope images
Authors: Matthew J. Baumstark, Giuseppe Vinci
Date: 2023-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Morphology classification

The classification of galaxy morphologies is an important step in the investigation of theories of hierarchical structure formation. While human expert visual classification remains quite effective and accurate, it cannot keep up with the massive influx of data from emerging sky surveys. A variety of approaches have been proposed to classify large numbers of galaxies; these approaches include crowdsourced visual classification, and automated and computational methods, such as machine learning methods based on designed morphology statistics and deep learning. In this work, we develop two novel galaxy morphology statistics, descent average and descent variance, which can be efficiently extracted from telescope galaxy images. We further propose simplified versions of the existing image statistics concentration, asymmetry, and clumpiness, which have been widely used in the literature of galaxy morphologies. We utilize the galaxy image data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to demonstrate the effective performance of our proposed image statistics at accurately detecting spiral and elliptical galaxies when used as features of a random forest classifier.
QArchSearch: A Scalable Quantum Architecture Search Package
Authors: Ankit Kulshrestha, Danylo Lykov, Ilya Safro, Yuri Alexeev
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

The current era of quantum computing has yielded several algorithms that promise high computational efficiency. While the algorithms are sound in theory and can provide potentially exponential speedup, there is little guidance on how to design proper quantum circuits to realize the appropriate unitary transformation to be applied to the input quantum state. In this paper, we present \texttt{QArchSearch}, an AI based quantum architecture search package with the \texttt{QTensor} library as a backend that provides a principled and automated approach to finding the best model given a task and input quantum state. We show that the search package is able to efficiently scale the search to large quantum circuits and enables the exploration of more complex models for different quantum applications. \texttt{QArchSearch} runs at scale and high efficiency on high-performance computing systems using a two-level parallelization scheme on both CPUs and GPUs, which has been demonstrated on the Polaris supercomputer.
ASV Station Keeping under Wind Disturbances using Neural Network Simulation Error Minimization Model Predictive Control
Authors: Jalil Chavez-Galaviz, Jianwen Li, Ajinkya Chaudhary, Nina Mahmoudian
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Predictive Control, Neural Network simulation, Position

Station keeping is an essential maneuver for Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs), mainly when used in confined spaces, to carry out surveys that require the ASV to keep its position or in collaboration with other vehicles where the relative position has an impact over the mission. However, this maneuver can become challenging for classic feedback controllers due to the need for an accurate model of the ASV dynamics and the environmental disturbances. This work proposes a Model Predictive Controller using Neural Network Simulation Error Minimization (NNSEM-MPC) to accurately predict the dynamics of the ASV under wind disturbances. The performance of the proposed scheme under wind disturbances is tested and compared against other controllers in simulation, using the Robotics Operating System (ROS) and the multipurpose simulation environment Gazebo. A set of six tests were conducted by combining two wind speeds (3 m/s and 6 m/s) and three wind directions (0$^\circ$, 90$^\circ$, and 180$^\circ$). The simulation results clearly show the advantage of the NNSEM-MPC over the following methods: backstepping controller, sliding mode controller, simplified dynamics MPC (SD-MPC), neural ordinary differential equation MPC (NODE-MPC), and knowledge-based NODE MPC (KNODE-MPC). The proposed NNSEM-MPC approach performs better than the rest in 4 out of the 6 test conditions, and it is the second best in the 2 remaining test cases, reducing the mean position and heading error by at least 31\% and 46\% respectively across all the test cases. In terms of execution speed, the proposed NNSEM-MPC is at least 36\% faster than the rest of the MPC controllers. The field experiments on two different ASV platforms showed that ASVs can effectively keep the station utilizing the proposed method, with a position error as low as $1.68$ m and a heading error as low as $6.14^{\circ}$ within time windows of at least $150$s.
Deep Learning based Systems for Crater Detection: A Review
Authors: Atal Tewari, K Prateek, Amrita Singh, Nitin Khanna
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Age Estimation, Deep Learning, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation, Survey

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