pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Can Self-Supervised Representation Learning Methods Withstand Distribution Shifts and Corruptions?
Authors: Prakash Chandra Chhipa, Johan Rodahl Holmgren, Kanjar De, Rajkumar Saini, Marcus Liwicki
Date: 2023-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Knowledge Distillation, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning in computer vision aims to leverage the inherent structure and relationships within data to learn meaningful representations without explicit human annotation, enabling a holistic understanding of visual scenes. Robustness in vision machine learning ensures reliable and consistent performance, enhancing generalization, adaptability, and resistance to noise, variations, and adversarial attacks. Self-supervised paradigms, namely contrastive learning, knowledge distillation, mutual information maximization, and clustering, have been considered to have shown advances in invariant learning representations. This work investigates the robustness of learned representations of self-supervised learning approaches focusing on distribution shifts and image corruptions in computer vision. Detailed experiments have been conducted to study the robustness of self-supervised learning methods on distribution shifts and image corruptions. The empirical analysis demonstrates a clear relationship between the performance of learned representations within self-supervised paradigms and the severity of distribution shifts and corruptions. Notably, higher levels of shifts and corruptions are found to significantly diminish the robustness of the learned representations. These findings highlight the critical impact of distribution shifts and image corruptions on the performance and resilience of self-supervised learning methods, emphasizing the need for effective strategies to mitigate their adverse effects. The study strongly advocates for future research in the field of self-supervised representation learning to prioritize the key aspects of safety and robustness in order to ensure practical applicability. The source code and results are available on GitHub.
Hierarchical Semi-Supervised Learning Framework for Surgical Gesture Segmentation and Recognition Based on Multi-Modality Data
Authors: Zhili Yuan, Jialin Lin, Dandan Zhang
Date: 2023-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Gesture Recognition, Segmentation

Segmenting and recognizing surgical operation trajectories into distinct, meaningful gestures is a critical preliminary step in surgical workflow analysis for robot-assisted surgery. This step is necessary for facilitating learning from demonstrations for autonomous robotic surgery, evaluating surgical skills, and so on. In this work, we develop a hierarchical semi-supervised learning framework for surgical gesture segmentation using multi-modality data (i.e. kinematics and vision data). More specifically, surgical tasks are initially segmented based on distance characteristics-based profiles and variance characteristics-based profiles constructed using kinematics data. Subsequently, a Transformer-based network with a pre-trained `ResNet-18' backbone is used to extract visual features from the surgical operation videos. By combining the potential segmentation points obtained from both modalities, we can determine the final segmentation points. Furthermore, gesture recognition can be implemented based on supervised learning. The proposed approach has been evaluated using data from the publicly available JIGSAWS database, including Suturing, Needle Passing, and Knot Tying tasks. The results reveal an average F1 score of 0.623 for segmentation and an accuracy of 0.856 for recognition.
Learning to Generate Training Datasets for Robust Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Marwane Hariat, Olivier Laurent, Rémi Kazmierczak, Shihao Zhang, Andrei Bursuc, Angela Yao, Gianni Franchi
Date: 2023-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation methods have advanced significantly. Still, their robustness to real-world perturbations and object types not seen during training remains a challenge, particularly in safety-critical applications. We propose a novel approach to improve the robustness of semantic segmentation techniques by leveraging the synergy between label-to-image generators and image-to-label segmentation models. Specifically, we design Robusta, a novel robust conditional generative adversarial network to generate realistic and plausible perturbed images that can be used to train reliable segmentation models. We conduct in-depth studies of the proposed generative model, assess the performance and robustness of the downstream segmentation network, and demonstrate that our approach can significantly enhance the robustness in the face of real-world perturbations, distribution shifts, and out-of-distribution samples. Our results suggest that this approach could be valuable in safety-critical applications, where the reliability of perception modules such as semantic segmentation is of utmost importance and comes with a limited computational budget in inference. We release our code at https://github.com/ENSTA-U2IS-AI/robusta.
Degeneration-Tuning: Using Scrambled Grid shield Unwanted Concepts from Stable Diffusion
Authors: Zixuan Ni, Longhui Wei, Jiacheng Li, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang, Qi Tian
Date: 2023-08-02 00:00:00

Owing to the unrestricted nature of the content in the training data, large text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion (SD), are capable of generating images with potentially copyrighted or dangerous content based on corresponding textual concepts information. This includes specific intellectual property (IP), human faces, and various artistic styles. However, Negative Prompt, a widely used method for content removal, frequently fails to conceal this content due to inherent limitations in its inference logic. In this work, we propose a novel strategy named \textbf{Degeneration-Tuning (DT)} to shield contents of unwanted concepts from SD weights. By utilizing Scrambled Grid to reconstruct the correlation between undesired concepts and their corresponding image domain, we guide SD to generate meaningless content when such textual concepts are provided as input. As this adaptation occurs at the level of the model's weights, the SD, after DT, can be grafted onto other conditional diffusion frameworks like ControlNet to shield unwanted concepts. In addition to qualitatively showcasing the effectiveness of our DT method in protecting various types of concepts, a quantitative comparison of the SD before and after DT indicates that the DT method does not significantly impact the generative quality of other contents. The FID and IS scores of the model on COCO-30K exhibit only minor changes after DT, shifting from 12.61 and 39.20 to 13.04 and 38.25, respectively, which clearly outperforms the previous methods.
Survey on Computer Vision Techniques for Internet-of-Things Devices
Authors: Ishmeet Kaur, Adwaita Janardhan Jadhav
Date: 2023-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Network Compression, Survey

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are state-of-the-art techniques for solving most computer vision problems. DNNs require billions of parameters and operations to achieve state-of-the-art results. This requirement makes DNNs extremely compute, memory, and energy-hungry, and consequently difficult to deploy on small battery-powered Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices with limited computing resources. Deployment of DNNs on Internet-of-Things devices, such as traffic cameras, can improve public safety by enabling applications such as automatic accident detection and emergency response.Through this paper, we survey the recent advances in low-power and energy-efficient DNN implementations that improve the deployability of DNNs without significantly sacrificing accuracy. In general, these techniques either reduce the memory requirements, the number of arithmetic operations, or both. The techniques can be divided into three major categories: neural network compression, network architecture search and design, and compiler and graph optimizations. In this paper, we survey both low-power techniques for both convolutional and transformer DNNs, and summarize the advantages, disadvantages, and open research problems.
Improving Generalization of Adversarial Training via Robust Critical Fine-Tuning
Authors: Kaijie Zhu, Jindong Wang, Xixu Hu, Xing Xie, Ge Yang
Date: 2023-08-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Deep neural networks are susceptible to adversarial examples, posing a significant security risk in critical applications. Adversarial Training (AT) is a well-established technique to enhance adversarial robustness, but it often comes at the cost of decreased generalization ability. This paper proposes Robustness Critical Fine-Tuning (RiFT), a novel approach to enhance generalization without compromising adversarial robustness. The core idea of RiFT is to exploit the redundant capacity for robustness by fine-tuning the adversarially trained model on its non-robust-critical module. To do so, we introduce module robust criticality (MRC), a measure that evaluates the significance of a given module to model robustness under worst-case weight perturbations. Using this measure, we identify the module with the lowest MRC value as the non-robust-critical module and fine-tune its weights to obtain fine-tuned weights. Subsequently, we linearly interpolate between the adversarially trained weights and fine-tuned weights to derive the optimal fine-tuned model weights. We demonstrate the efficacy of RiFT on ResNet18, ResNet34, and WideResNet34-10 models trained on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and Tiny-ImageNet datasets. Our experiments show that \method can significantly improve both generalization and out-of-distribution robustness by around 1.5% while maintaining or even slightly enhancing adversarial robustness. Code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/robustlearn.
qgym: A Gym for Training and Benchmarking RL-Based Quantum Compilation
Authors: Stan van der Linde, Willem de Kok, Tariq Bontekoe, Sebastian Feld
Date: 2023-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, OpenAI Gym, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Compiling a quantum circuit for specific quantum hardware is a challenging task. Moreover, current quantum computers have severe hardware limitations. To make the most use of the limited resources, the compilation process should be optimized. To improve currents methods, Reinforcement Learning (RL), a technique in which an agent interacts with an environment to learn complex policies to attain a specific goal, can be used. In this work, we present qgym, a software framework derived from the OpenAI gym, together with environments that are specifically tailored towards quantum compilation. The goal of qgym is to connect the research fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with quantum compilation by abstracting parts of the process that are irrelevant to either domain. It can be used to train and benchmark RL agents and algorithms in highly customizable environments.
Unveiling Emotions from EEG: A GRU-Based Approach
Authors: Sarthak Johari, Gowri Namratha Meedinti, Radhakrishnan Delhibabu, Deepak Joshi
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Emotion Classification, Emotion Recognition

One of the most important study areas in affective computing is emotion identification using EEG data. In this study, the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) algorithm, which is a type of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), is tested to see if it can use EEG signals to predict emotional states. Our publicly accessible dataset consists of resting neutral data as well as EEG recordings from people who were exposed to stimuli evoking happy, neutral, and negative emotions. For the best feature extraction, we pre-process the EEG data using artifact removal, bandpass filters, and normalization methods. With 100% accuracy on the validation set, our model produced outstanding results by utilizing the GRU's capacity to capture temporal dependencies. When compared to other machine learning techniques, our GRU model's Extreme Gradient Boosting Classifier had the highest accuracy. Our investigation of the confusion matrix revealed insightful information about the performance of the model, enabling precise emotion classification. This study emphasizes the potential of deep learning models like GRUs for emotion recognition and advances in affective computing. Our findings open up new possibilities for interacting with computers and comprehending how emotions are expressed through brainwave activity.
Search Engine and Recommendation System for the Music Industry built with JinaAI
Authors: Ishita Gopalakrishnan, Sanjjushri Varshini R, Ponshriharini V
Date: 2023-08-07 00:00:00

One of the most intriguing debates regarding a novel task is the development of search engines and recommendation-based systems in the music industry. Studies have shown a drastic depression in the search engine fields, due to concerning factors such as speed, accuracy and the format of data given for querying. Often people face difficulty in searching for a song solely based on the title, hence a solution is proposed to complete a search analysis through a single query input and is matched with the lyrics of the songs present in the database. Hence it is essential to incorporate cutting-edge technology tools for developing a user-friendly search engine. Jina AI is an MLOps framework for building neural search engines that are utilized, in order for the user to obtain accurate results. Jina AI effectively helps to maintain and enhance the quality of performance for the search engine for the query given. An effective search engine and a recommendation system for the music industry, built with JinaAI.
Safety-Critical Control under Multiple State and Input Constraints and Application to Fixed-Wing UAV
Authors: Donggeon David Oh, Dongjae Lee, H. Jin Kim
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Collision Avoidance

This study presents a framework to guarantee safety for a class of second-order nonlinear systems under multiple state and input constraints. To facilitate real-world applications, a safety-critical controller must consider multiple constraints simultaneously, while being able to impose general forms of constraints designed for various tasks (e.g., obstacle avoidance). With this in mind, we first devise a zeroing control barrier function (ZCBF) using a newly proposed nominal evading maneuver. By designing the nominal evading maneuver to 1) be continuously differentiable, 2) satisfy input constraints, and 3) be capable of handling other state constraints, we deduce an ultimate invariant set, a subset of the safe set that can be rendered forward invariant with admissible control inputs. Thanks to the development of the ultimate invariant set, we then propose a safety-critical controller, which is a computationally tractable one-step model predictive controller (MPC) with guaranteed recursive feasibility. We validate the proposed framework in simulation, where a fixed-wing UAV tracks a circular trajectory while satisfying multiple safety constraints including collision avoidance, bounds on flight speed and flight path angle, and input constraints.
Nest-DGIL: Nesterov-optimized Deep Geometric Incremental Learning for CS Image Reconstruction
Authors: Xiaohong Fan, Yin Yang, Ke Chen, Yujie Feng, Jianping Zhang
Date: 2023-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction, Image Restoration, Incremental Learning

Proximal gradient-based optimization is one of the most common strategies to solve inverse problem of images, and it is easy to implement. However, these techniques often generate heavy artifacts in image reconstruction. One of the most popular refinement methods is to fine-tune the regularization parameter to alleviate such artifacts, but it may not always be sufficient or applicable due to increased computational costs. In this work, we propose a deep geometric incremental learning framework based on the second Nesterov proximal gradient optimization. The proposed end-to-end network not only has the powerful learning ability for high-/low-frequency image features, but also can theoretically guarantee that geometric texture details will be reconstructed from preliminary linear reconstruction. Furthermore, it can avoid the risk of intermediate reconstruction results falling outside the geometric decomposition domains and achieve fast convergence. Our reconstruction framework is decomposed into four modules including general linear reconstruction, cascade geometric incremental restoration, Nesterov acceleration, and post-processing. In the image restoration step, a cascade geometric incremental learning module is designed to compensate for missing texture information from different geometric spectral decomposition domains. Inspired by the overlap-tile strategy, we also develop a post-processing module to remove the block effect in patch-wise-based natural image reconstruction. All parameters in the proposed model are learnable, an adaptive initialization technique of physical parameters is also employed to make model flexibility and ensure converging smoothly. We compare the reconstruction performance of the proposed method with existing state-of-the-art methods to demonstrate its superiority. Our source codes are available at https://github.com/fanxiaohong/Nest-DGIL.
SODFormer: Streaming Object Detection with Transformer Using Events and Frames
Authors: Dianze Li, Jianing Li, Yonghong Tian
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

DAVIS camera, streaming two complementary sensing modalities of asynchronous events and frames, has gradually been used to address major object detection challenges (e.g., fast motion blur and low-light). However, how to effectively leverage rich temporal cues and fuse two heterogeneous visual streams remains a challenging endeavor. To address this challenge, we propose a novel streaming object detector with Transformer, namely SODFormer, which first integrates events and frames to continuously detect objects in an asynchronous manner. Technically, we first build a large-scale multimodal neuromorphic object detection dataset (i.e., PKU-DAVIS-SOD) over 1080.1k manual labels. Then, we design a spatiotemporal Transformer architecture to detect objects via an end-to-end sequence prediction problem, where the novel temporal Transformer module leverages rich temporal cues from two visual streams to improve the detection performance. Finally, an asynchronous attention-based fusion module is proposed to integrate two heterogeneous sensing modalities and take complementary advantages from each end, which can be queried at any time to locate objects and break through the limited output frequency from synchronized frame-based fusion strategies. The results show that the proposed SODFormer outperforms four state-of-the-art methods and our eight baselines by a significant margin. We also show that our unifying framework works well even in cases where the conventional frame-based camera fails, e.g., high-speed motion and low-light conditions. Our dataset and code can be available at https://github.com/dianzl/SODFormer.
SILO Language Models: Isolating Legal Risk In a Nonparametric Datastore
Authors: Sewon Min, Suchin Gururangan, Eric Wallace, Weijia Shi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Sentence

The legality of training language models (LMs) on copyrighted or otherwise restricted data is under intense debate. However, as we show, model performance significantly degrades if trained only on low-risk text (e.g., out-of-copyright books or government documents), due to its limited size and domain coverage. We present SILO, a new language model that manages this risk-performance tradeoff during inference. SILO is built by (1) training a parametric LM on Open License Corpus (OLC), a new corpus we curate with 228B tokens of public domain and permissively licensed text and (2) augmenting it with a more general and easily modifiable nonparametric datastore (e.g., containing copyrighted books or news) that is only queried during inference. The datastore allows use of high-risk data without training on it, supports sentence-level data attribution, and enables data producers to opt out from the model by removing content from the store. These capabilities can foster compliance with data-use regulations such as the fair use doctrine in the United States and the GDPR in the European Union. Our experiments show that the parametric LM struggles on domains not covered by OLC. However, access to the datastore greatly improves out of domain performance, closing 90% of the performance gap with an LM trained on the Pile, a more diverse corpus with mostly high-risk text. We also analyze which nonparametric approach works best, where the remaining errors lie, and how performance scales with datastore size. Our results suggest that it is possible to build high quality language models while mitigating their legal risk.
Probabilistic Invariant Learning with Randomized Linear Classifiers
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Binary Classification

Designing models that are both expressive and preserve known invariances of tasks is an increasingly hard problem. Existing solutions tradeoff invariance for computational or memory resources. In this work, we show how to leverage randomness and design models that are both expressive and invariant but use less resources. Inspired by randomized algorithms, our key insight is that accepting probabilistic notions of universal approximation and invariance can reduce our resource requirements. More specifically, we propose a class of binary classification models called Randomized Linear Classifiers (RLCs). We give parameter and sample size conditions in which RLCs can, with high probability, approximate any (smooth) function while preserving invariance to compact group transformations. Leveraging this result, we design three RLCs that are provably probabilistic invariant for classification tasks over sets, graphs, and spherical data. We show how these models can achieve probabilistic invariance and universality using less resources than (deterministic) neural networks and their invariant counterparts. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the benefits of this new class of models on invariant tasks where deterministic invariant neural networks are known to struggle.