pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
BackdoorBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Analysis of Backdoor Learning
Authors: Baoyuan Wu, Hongrui Chen, Mingda Zhang, Zihao Zhu, Shaokui Wei, Danni Yuan, Mingli Zhu, Ruotong Wang, Li Liu, Chao Shen
Date: 2024-01-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack

As an emerging and vital topic for studying deep neural networks' vulnerability (DNNs), backdoor learning has attracted increasing interest in recent years, and many seminal backdoor attack and defense algorithms are being developed successively or concurrently, in the status of a rapid arms race. However, mainly due to the diverse settings, and the difficulties of implementation and reproducibility of existing works, there is a lack of a unified and standardized benchmark of backdoor learning, causing unfair comparisons, and unreliable conclusions (e.g., misleading, biased or even false conclusions). Consequently, it is difficult to evaluate the current progress and design the future development roadmap of this literature. To alleviate this dilemma, we build a comprehensive benchmark of backdoor learning called BackdoorBench. Our benchmark makes three valuable contributions to the research community. 1) We provide an integrated implementation of state-of-the-art (SOTA) backdoor learning algorithms (currently including 16 attack and 27 defense algorithms), based on an extensible modular-based codebase. 2) We conduct comprehensive evaluations of 12 attacks against 16 defenses, with 5 poisoning ratios, based on 4 models and 4 datasets, thus 11,492 pairs of evaluations in total. 3) Based on above evaluations, we present abundant analysis from 8 perspectives via 18 useful analysis tools, and provide several inspiring insights about backdoor learning. We hope that our efforts could build a solid foundation of backdoor learning to facilitate researchers to investigate existing algorithms, develop more innovative algorithms, and explore the intrinsic mechanism of backdoor learning. Finally, we have created a user-friendly website at http://backdoorbench.com, which collects all important information of BackdoorBench, including codebase, docs, leaderboard, and model Zoo.
Learning Neural Radiance Fields of Forest Structure for Scalable and Fine Monitoring
Authors: Juan Castorena
Date: 2024-01-26 00:00:00

This work leverages neural radiance fields and remote sensing for forestry applications. Here, we show neural radiance fields offer a wide range of possibilities to improve upon existing remote sensing methods in forest monitoring. We present experiments that demonstrate their potential to: (1) express fine features of forest 3D structure, (2) fuse available remote sensing modalities and (3), improve upon 3D structure derived forest metrics. Altogether, these properties make neural fields an attractive computational tool with great potential to further advance the scalability and accuracy of forest monitoring programs.
Unrecognizable Yet Identifiable: Image Distortion with Preserved Embeddings
Authors: Dmytro Zakharov, Oleksandr Kuznetsov, Emanuele Frontoni
Date: 2024-01-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Security Studies

Biometric authentication systems play a crucial role in modern security systems. However, maintaining the balance of privacy and integrity of stored biometrics derivative data while achieving high recognition accuracy is often challenging. Addressing this issue, we introduce an innovative image transformation technique that effectively renders facial images unrecognizable to the eye while maintaining their identifiability by neural network models, which allows the distorted photo version to be stored for further verification. While initially intended for biometrics systems, the proposed methodology can be used in various artificial intelligence applications to distort the visual data and keep the derived features close. By experimenting with widely used datasets LFW and MNIST, we show that it is possible to build the distortion that changes the image content by more than 70% while maintaining the same recognition accuracy. We compare our method with previously state-of-the-art approaches. We publically release the source code.
Deep learning-based approach for tomato classification in complex scenes
Authors: Mikael A. Mousse, Bethel C. A. R. K. Atohoun, Cina Motamed
Date: 2024-01-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Tracking ripening tomatoes is time consuming and labor intensive. Artificial intelligence technologies combined with those of computer vision can help users optimize the process of monitoring the ripening status of plants. To this end, we have proposed a tomato ripening monitoring approach based on deep learning in complex scenes. The objective is to detect mature tomatoes and harvest them in a timely manner. The proposed approach is declined in two parts. Firstly, the images of the scene are transmitted to the pre-processing layer. This process allows the detection of areas of interest (area of the image containing tomatoes). Then, these images are used as input to the maturity detection layer. This layer, based on a deep neural network learning algorithm, classifies the tomato thumbnails provided to it in one of the following five categories: green, brittle, pink, pale red, mature red. The experiments are based on images collected from the internet gathered through searches using tomato state across diverse languages including English, German, French, and Spanish. The experimental results of the maturity detection layer on a dataset composed of images of tomatoes taken under the extreme conditions, gave a good classification rate.
From GPT-4 to Gemini and Beyond: Assessing the Landscape of MLLMs on Generalizability, Trustworthiness and Causality through Four Modalities
Authors: Chaochao Lu, Chen Qian, Guodong Zheng, Hongxing Fan, Hongzhi Gao, Jie Zhang, Jing Shao, Jingyi Deng, Jinlan Fu, Kexin Huang, Kunchang Li, Lijun Li, LiMin Wang, Lu Sheng, Meiqi Chen, Ming Zhang, Qibing Ren, Sirui Chen, Tao Gui, Wanli Ouyang, Yali Wang, Yan Teng, Yaru Wang, Yi Wang, Yinan He, Yingchun Wang, Yixu Wang, Yongting Zhang, Yu Qiao, Yujiong Shen, Yurong Mou, Yuxi Chen, Zaibin Zhang, Zhelun Shi, Zhenfei Yin, Zhipin Wang
Date: 2024-01-26 00:00:00

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive abilities in generating reasonable responses with respect to multi-modal contents. However, there is still a wide gap between the performance of recent MLLM-based applications and the expectation of the broad public, even though the most powerful OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini have been deployed. This paper strives to enhance understanding of the gap through the lens of a qualitative study on the generalizability, trustworthiness, and causal reasoning capabilities of recent proprietary and open-source MLLMs across four modalities: ie, text, code, image, and video, ultimately aiming to improve the transparency of MLLMs. We believe these properties are several representative factors that define the reliability of MLLMs, in supporting various downstream applications. To be specific, we evaluate the closed-source GPT-4 and Gemini and 6 open-source LLMs and MLLMs. Overall we evaluate 230 manually designed cases, where the qualitative results are then summarized into 12 scores (ie, 4 modalities times 3 properties). In total, we uncover 14 empirical findings that are useful to understand the capabilities and limitations of both proprietary and open-source MLLMs, towards more reliable downstream multi-modal applications.
Annotated Hands for Generative Models
Authors: Yue Yang, Atith N Gandhi, Greg Turk
Date: 2024-01-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Generation

Generative models such as GANs and diffusion models have demonstrated impressive image generation capabilities. Despite these successes, these systems are surprisingly poor at creating images with hands. We propose a novel training framework for generative models that substantially improves the ability of such systems to create hand images. Our approach is to augment the training images with three additional channels that provide annotations to hands in the image. These annotations provide additional structure that coax the generative model to produce higher quality hand images. We demonstrate this approach on two different generative models: a generative adversarial network and a diffusion model. We demonstrate our method both on a new synthetic dataset of hand images and also on real photographs that contain hands. We measure the improved quality of the generated hands through higher confidence in finger joint identification using an off-the-shelf hand detector.
Fuzzy Logic-Based System for Brain Tumour Detection and Classification
Authors: NVSL Narasimham, Keshav Kumar K
Date: 2024-01-21 00:00:00

Brain Tumours (BT) are extremely dangerous and difficult to treat. Currently, doctors must manually examine images and manually mark out tumour regions to diagnose BT; this process is time-consuming and error-prone. In recent times, experts have proposed automating approaches for detecting BT at an early stage. The poor accuracy and highly incorrect prediction results of these methods caused them to start the research. In this study, we suggest a fuzzy logic-based system for categorising BT. This study used a dataset of 253 Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) brain images that included tumour and healthy images. The images were first pre-processed. After that, we pull out features like tumour size and the image's global threshold value. The watershed and region-growing approach is used to calculate the tumour size. After that, the fuzzy system receives the two features as input. Accuracy, F1-score, precision, and recall are used to assess the results of the fuzzy by employing both size determination approaches. With the size input variable discovered by the region growth method and global threshold values, the fuzzy system outperforms the watershed method. The significance of this research lies in its potential to revolutionize brain tumour diagnosis by offering a more accurate and efficient automated classification system. By reducing human intervention and providing reliable results, this approach could assist medical professionals in making timely and precise decisions, leading to improved patient outcomes and potentially saving lives. The advancement of such automated techniques has the potential to pave the way for enhanced medical imaging analysis and, ultimately, better management of brain tumour cases.
ICASSP 2024 Speech Signal Improvement Challenge
Authors: Nicolae Catalin Ristea, Ando Saabas, Ross Cutler, Babak Naderi, Sebastian Braun, Solomiya Branets
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00

The ICASSP 2024 Speech Signal Improvement Grand Challenge is intended to stimulate research in the area of improving the speech signal quality in communication systems. This marks our second challenge, building upon the success from the previous ICASSP 2023 Grand Challenge. We enhance the competition by introducing a dataset synthesizer, enabling all participating teams to start at a higher baseline, an objective metric for our extended P.804 tests, transcripts for the 2023 test set, and we add Word Accuracy (WAcc) as a metric. We evaluate a total of 13 systems in the real-time track and 11 systems in the non-real-time track using both subjective P.804 and objective Word Accuracy metrics.
MResT: Multi-Resolution Sensing for Real-Time Control with Vision-Language Models
Authors: Saumya Saxena, Mohit Sharma, Oliver Kroemer
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00

Leveraging sensing modalities across diverse spatial and temporal resolutions can improve performance of robotic manipulation tasks. Multi-spatial resolution sensing provides hierarchical information captured at different spatial scales and enables both coarse and precise motions. Simultaneously multi-temporal resolution sensing enables the agent to exhibit high reactivity and real-time control. In this work, we propose a framework, MResT (Multi-Resolution Transformer), for learning generalizable language-conditioned multi-task policies that utilize sensing at different spatial and temporal resolutions using networks of varying capacities to effectively perform real time control of precise and reactive tasks. We leverage off-the-shelf pretrained vision-language models to operate on low-frequency global features along with small non-pretrained models to adapt to high frequency local feedback. Through extensive experiments in 3 domains (coarse, precise and dynamic manipulation tasks), we show that our approach significantly improves (2X on average) over recent multi-task baselines. Further, our approach generalizes well to visual and geometric variations in target objects and to varying interaction forces.
CaRiNG: Learning Temporal Causal Representation under Non-Invertible Generation Process
Authors: Guangyi Chen, Yifan Shen, Zhenhao Chen, Xiangchen Song, Yuewen Sun, Weiran Yao, Xiao Liu, Kun Zhang
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00

Identifying the underlying time-delayed latent causal processes in sequential data is vital for grasping temporal dynamics and making downstream reasoning. While some recent methods can robustly identify these latent causal variables, they rely on strict assumptions about the invertible generation process from latent variables to observed data. However, these assumptions are often hard to satisfy in real-world applications containing information loss. For instance, the visual perception process translates a 3D space into 2D images, or the phenomenon of persistence of vision incorporates historical data into current perceptions. To address this challenge, we establish an identifiability theory that allows for the recovery of independent latent components even when they come from a nonlinear and non-invertible mix. Using this theory as a foundation, we propose a principled approach, CaRiNG, to learn the CAusal RepresentatIon of Non-invertible Generative temporal data with identifiability guarantees. Specifically, we utilize temporal context to recover lost latent information and apply the conditions in our theory to guide the training process. Through experiments conducted on synthetic datasets, we validate that our CaRiNG method reliably identifies the causal process, even when the generation process is non-invertible. Moreover, we demonstrate that our approach considerably improves temporal understanding and reasoning in practical applications.
Additional Look into GAN-based Augmentation for Deep Learning COVID-19 Image Classification
Authors: Oleksandr Fedoruk, Konrad Klimaszewski, Aleksander Ogonowski, Michał Kruk
Date: 2024-01-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, image-classification, Image Classification, Multi-class Classification, Transfer Learning

The availability of training data is one of the main limitations in deep learning applications for medical imaging. Data augmentation is a popular approach to overcome this problem. A new approach is a Machine Learning based augmentation, in particular usage of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). In this case, GANs generate images similar to the original dataset so that the overall training data amount is bigger, which leads to better performance of trained networks. A GAN model consists of two networks, a generator and a discriminator interconnected in a feedback loop which creates a competitive environment. This work is a continuation of the previous research where we trained StyleGAN2-ADA by Nvidia on the limited COVID-19 chest X-ray image dataset. In this paper, we study the dependence of the GAN-based augmentation performance on dataset size with a focus on small samples. Two datasets are considered, one with 1000 images per class (4000 images in total) and the second with 500 images per class (2000 images in total). We train StyleGAN2-ADA with both sets and then, after validating the quality of generated images, we use trained GANs as one of the augmentations approaches in multi-class classification problems. We compare the quality of the GAN-based augmentation approach to two different approaches (classical augmentation and no augmentation at all) by employing transfer learning-based classification of COVID-19 chest X-ray images. The results are quantified using different classification quality metrics and compared to the results from the literature. The GAN-based augmentation approach is found to be comparable with classical augmentation in the case of medium and large datasets but underperforms in the case of smaller datasets. The correlation between the size of the original dataset and the quality of classification is visible independently from the augmentation approach.
Topology-Aware Exploration of Energy-Based Models Equilibrium: Toric QC-LDPC Codes and Hyperbolic MET QC-LDPC Codes
Authors: Vasiliy Usatyuk, Denis Sapozhnikov, Sergey Egorov
Date: 2024-01-26 00:00:00

This paper presents a method for achieving equilibrium in the ISING Hamiltonian when confronted with unevenly distributed charges on an irregular grid. Employing (Multi-Edge) QC-LDPC codes and the Boltzmann machine, our approach involves dimensionally expanding the system, substituting charges with circulants, and representing distances through circulant shifts. This results in a systematic mapping of the charge system onto a space, transforming the irregular grid into a uniform configuration, applicable to Torical and Circular Hyperboloid Topologies. The paper covers fundamental definitions and notations related to QC-LDPC Codes, Multi-Edge QC-LDPC codes, and the Boltzmann machine. It explores the marginalization problem in code on the graph probabilistic models for evaluating the partition function, encompassing exact and approximate estimation techniques. Rigorous proof is provided for the attainability of equilibrium states for the Boltzmann machine under Torical and Circular Hyperboloid, paving the way for the application of our methodology. Practical applications of our approach are investigated in Finite Geometry QC-LDPC Codes, specifically in Material Science. The paper further explores its effectiveness in the realm of Natural Language Processing Transformer Deep Neural Networks, examining Generalized Repeat Accumulate Codes, Spatially-Coupled and Cage-Graph QC-LDPC Codes. The versatile and impactful nature of our topology-aware hardware-efficient quasi-cycle codes equilibrium method is showcased across diverse scientific domains without the use of specific section delineations.
The Machine Vision Iceberg Explained: Advancing Dynamic Testing by Considering Holistic Environmental Relations
Authors: Hubert Padusinski, Christian Steinhauser, Thilo Braun, Lennart Ries, Eric Sax
Date: 2024-01-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Recognition

Machine Vision (MV) is essential for solving driving automation. This paper examines potential shortcomings in current MV testing strategies for highly automated driving (HAD) systems. We argue for a more comprehensive understanding of the performance factors that must be considered during the MV evaluation process, noting that neglecting these factors can lead to significant risks. This is not only relevant to MV component testing, but also to integration testing. To illustrate this point, we draw an analogy to a ship navigating towards an iceberg to show potential hidden challenges in current MV testing strategies. The main contribution is a novel framework for black-box testing which observes environmental relations. This means it is designed to enhance MV assessments by considering the attributes and surroundings of relevant individual objects. The framework provides the identification of seven general concerns about the object recognition of MV, which are not addressed adequately in established test processes. To detect these deficits based on their performance factors, we propose the use of a taxonomy called "granularity orders" along with a graphical representation. This allows an identification of MV uncertainties across a range of driving scenarios. This approach aims to advance the precision, efficiency, and completeness of testing procedures for MV.
Understanding Domain Generalization: A Noise Robustness Perspective
Authors: Rui Qiao, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
Date: 2024-01-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization

Despite the rapid development of machine learning algorithms for domain generalization (DG), there is no clear empirical evidence that the existing DG algorithms outperform the classic empirical risk minimization (ERM) across standard benchmarks. To better understand this phenomenon, we investigate whether there are benefits of DG algorithms over ERM through the lens of label noise. Specifically, our finite-sample analysis reveals that label noise exacerbates the effect of spurious correlations for ERM, undermining generalization. Conversely, we illustrate that DG algorithms exhibit implicit label-noise robustness during finite-sample training even when spurious correlation is present. Such desirable property helps mitigate spurious correlations and improve generalization in synthetic experiments. However, additional comprehensive experiments on real-world benchmark datasets indicate that label-noise robustness does not necessarily translate to better performance compared to ERM. We conjecture that the failure mode of ERM arising from spurious correlations may be less pronounced in practice.
Conserve-Update-Revise to Cure Generalization and Robustness Trade-off in Adversarial Training
Authors: Shruthi Gowda, Bahram Zonooz, Elahe Arani
Date: 2024-01-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization

Adversarial training improves the robustness of neural networks against adversarial attacks, albeit at the expense of the trade-off between standard and robust generalization. To unveil the underlying factors driving this phenomenon, we examine the layer-wise learning capabilities of neural networks during the transition from a standard to an adversarial setting. Our empirical findings demonstrate that selectively updating specific layers while preserving others can substantially enhance the network's learning capacity. We therefore propose CURE, a novel training framework that leverages a gradient prominence criterion to perform selective conservation, updating, and revision of weights. Importantly, CURE is designed to be dataset- and architecture-agnostic, ensuring its applicability across various scenarios. It effectively tackles both memorization and overfitting issues, thus enhancing the trade-off between robustness and generalization and additionally, this training approach also aids in mitigating "robust overfitting". Furthermore, our study provides valuable insights into the mechanisms of selective adversarial training and offers a promising avenue for future research.