pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Real-time Ship Recognition and Georeferencing for the Improvement of Maritime Situational Awareness
Authors: Borja Carrillo Perez
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: geo-localization, Instance Segmentation

In an era where maritime infrastructures are crucial, advanced situational awareness solutions are increasingly important. The use of optical camera systems can allow real-time usage of maritime footage. This thesis presents an investigation into leveraging deep learning and computer vision to advance real-time ship recognition and georeferencing for the improvement of maritime situational awareness. A novel dataset, ShipSG, is introduced, containing 3,505 images and 11,625 ship masks with corresponding class and geographic position. After an exploration of state-of-the-art, a custom real-time segmentation architecture, ScatYOLOv8+CBAM, is designed for the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier embedded system. This architecture adds the 2D scattering transform and attention mechanisms to YOLOv8, achieving an mAP of 75.46% and an 25.3 ms per frame, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by over 5%. To improve small and distant ship recognition in high-resolution images on embedded systems, an enhanced slicing mechanism is introduced, improving mAP by 8% to 11%. Additionally, a georeferencing method is proposed, achieving positioning errors of 18 m for ships up to 400 m away and 44 m for ships between 400 m and 1200 m. The findings are also applied in real-world scenarios, such as the detection of abnormal ship behaviour, camera integrity assessment and 3D reconstruction. The approach of this thesis outperforms existing methods and provides a framework for integrating recognized and georeferenced ships into real-time systems, enhancing operational effectiveness and decision-making for maritime stakeholders. This thesis contributes to the maritime computer vision field by establishing a benchmark for ship segmentation and georeferencing research, demonstrating the viability of deep-learning-based recognition and georeferencing methods for real-time maritime monitoring.
Detecting and Approximating Redundant Computational Blocks in Neural Networks
Authors: Irene Cannistraci, Emanuele Rodolà, Bastian Rieck
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00

Deep neural networks often learn similar internal representations, both across different models and within their own layers. While inter-network similarities have enabled techniques such as model stitching and merging, intra-network similarities present new opportunities for designing more efficient architectures. In this paper, we investigate the emergence of these internal similarities across different layers in diverse neural architectures, showing that similarity patterns emerge independently of the datataset used. We introduce a simple metric, Block Redundancy, to detect redundant blocks, providing a foundation for future architectural optimization methods. Building on this, we propose Redundant Blocks Approximation (RBA), a general framework that identifies and approximates one or more redundant computational blocks using simpler transformations. We show that the transformation $\mathcal{T}$ between two representations can be efficiently computed in closed-form, and it is enough to replace the redundant blocks from the network. RBA reduces model parameters and time complexity while maintaining good performance. We validate our method on classification tasks in the vision domain using a variety of pretrained foundational models and datasets.
Training Interactive Agent in Large FPS Game Map with Rule-enhanced Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Chen Zhang, Huan Hu, Yuan Zhou, Qiyang Cao, Ruochen Liu, Wenya Wei, Elvis S. Liu
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, FPS Games

In the realm of competitive gaming, 3D first-person shooter (FPS) games have gained immense popularity, prompting the development of game AI systems to enhance gameplay. However, deploying game AI in practical scenarios still poses challenges, particularly in large-scale and complex FPS games. In this paper, we focus on the practical deployment of game AI in the online multiplayer competitive 3D FPS game called Arena Breakout, developed by Tencent Games. We propose a novel gaming AI system named Private Military Company Agent (PMCA), which is interactable within a large game map and engages in combat with players while utilizing tactical advantages provided by the surrounding terrain. To address the challenges of navigation and combat in modern 3D FPS games, we introduce a method that combines navigation mesh (Navmesh) and shooting-rule with deep reinforcement learning (NSRL). The integration of Navmesh enhances the agent's global navigation capabilities while shooting behavior is controlled using rule-based methods to ensure controllability. NSRL employs a DRL model to predict when to enable the navigation mesh, resulting in a diverse range of behaviors for the game AI. Customized rewards for human-like behaviors are also employed to align PMCA's behavior with that of human players.
The Role of Governments in Increasing Interconnected Post-Deployment Monitoring of AI
Authors: Merlin Stein, Jamie Bernardi, Connor Dunlop
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Language-based AI systems are diffusing into society, bringing positive and negative impacts. Mitigating negative impacts depends on accurate impact assessments, drawn from an empirical evidence base that makes causal connections between AI usage and impacts. Interconnected post-deployment monitoring combines information about model integration and use, application use, and incidents and impacts. For example, inference time monitoring of chain-of-thought reasoning can be combined with long-term monitoring of sectoral AI diffusion, impacts and incidents. Drawing on information sharing mechanisms in other industries, we highlight example data sources and specific data points that governments could collect to inform AI risk management.
Defense-as-a-Service: Black-box Shielding against Backdoored Graph Models
Authors: Xiao Yang, Kai Zhou, Yuni Lai, Gaolei Li
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack, Clustering, Graph Classification, Graph Learning

With the trend of large graph learning models, business owners tend to employ a model provided by a third party to deliver business services to users. However, these models might be backdoored, and malicious users can submit trigger-embedded inputs to manipulate the model predictions. Current graph backdoor defenses have several limitations: 1) depending on model-related details, 2) requiring additional model fine-tuning, and 3) relying upon extra explainability tools, all of which are infeasible under stringent privacy policies. To address those limitations, we propose GraphProt, which allows resource-constrained business owners to rely on third parties to avoid backdoor attacks on GNN-based graph classifiers. Our GraphProt is model-agnostic and only relies on the input graph. The key insight is to leverage subgraph information for prediction, thereby mitigating backdoor effects induced by triggers. GraphProt comprises two components: clustering-based trigger elimination and robust subgraph ensemble. Specifically, we first propose feature-topology clustering that aims to remove most of the anomalous subgraphs (triggers). Moreover, we design subgraph sampling strategies based on feature-topology clustering to build a robust classifier via majority vote. Experimental results across three backdoor attacks and six benchmark datasets demonstrate that GraphProt significantly reduces the backdoor attack success rate while preserving the model accuracy on regular graph classification tasks.
Patch is Enough: Naturalistic Adversarial Patch against Vision-Language Pre-training Models
Authors: Dehong Kong, Siyuan Liang, Xiaopeng Zhu, Yuansheng Zhong, Wenqi Ren
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image to text

Visual language pre-training (VLP) models have demonstrated significant success across various domains, yet they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Addressing these adversarial vulnerabilities is crucial for enhancing security in multimodal learning. Traditionally, adversarial methods targeting VLP models involve simultaneously perturbing images and text. However, this approach faces notable challenges: first, adversarial perturbations often fail to translate effectively into real-world scenarios; second, direct modifications to the text are conspicuously visible. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel strategy that exclusively employs image patches for attacks, thus preserving the integrity of the original text. Our method leverages prior knowledge from diffusion models to enhance the authenticity and naturalness of the perturbations. Moreover, to optimize patch placement and improve the efficacy of our attacks, we utilize the cross-attention mechanism, which encapsulates intermodal interactions by generating attention maps to guide strategic patch placements. Comprehensive experiments conducted in a white-box setting for image-to-text scenarios reveal that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing techniques, achieving a 100% attack success rate. Additionally, it demonstrates commendable performance in transfer tasks involving text-to-image configurations.
Leveraging Grammar Induction for Language Understanding and Generation
Authors: Jushi Kai, Shengyuan Hou, Yusheng Huang, Zhouhan Lin
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Natural Language Understanding

Grammar induction has made significant progress in recent years. However, it is not clear how the application of induced grammar could enhance practical performance in downstream tasks. In this work, we introduce an unsupervised grammar induction method for language understanding and generation. We construct a grammar parser to induce constituency structures and dependency relations, which is simultaneously trained on downstream tasks without additional syntax annotations. The induced grammar features are subsequently incorporated into Transformer as a syntactic mask to guide self-attention. We evaluate and apply our method to multiple machine translation tasks and natural language understanding tasks. Our method demonstrates superior performance compared to the original Transformer and other models enhanced with external parsers. Experimental results indicate that our method is effective in both from-scratch and pre-trained scenarios. Additionally, our research highlights the contribution of explicitly modeling the grammatical structure of texts to neural network models.
Mastering Chinese Chess AI (Xiangqi) Without Search
Authors: Yu Chen, Juntong Lin, Zhichao Shu
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

We have developed a high-performance Chinese Chess AI that operates without reliance on search algorithms. This AI has demonstrated the capability to compete at a level commensurate with the top 0.1\% of human players. By eliminating the search process typically associated with such systems, this AI achieves a Queries Per Second (QPS) rate that exceeds those of systems based on the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm by over a thousandfold and surpasses those based on the AlphaBeta pruning algorithm by more than a hundredfold. The AI training system consists of two parts: supervised learning and reinforcement learning. Supervised learning provides an initial human-like Chinese chess AI, while reinforcement learning, based on supervised learning, elevates the strength of the entire AI to a new level. Based on this training system, we carried out enough ablation experiments and discovered that 1. The same parameter amount of Transformer architecture has a higher performance than CNN on Chinese chess; 2. Possible moves of both sides as features can greatly improve the training process; 3. Selective opponent pool, compared to pure self-play training, results in a faster improvement curve and a higher strength limit. 4. Value Estimation with Cutoff(VECT) improves the original PPO algorithm training process and we will give the explanation.
Unsupervised Skill Discovery for Robotic Manipulation through Automatic Task Generation
Authors: Paul Jansonnie, Bingbing Wu, Julien Perez, Jan Peters
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Learning skills that interact with objects is of major importance for robotic manipulation. These skills can indeed serve as an efficient prior for solving various manipulation tasks. We propose a novel Skill Learning approach that discovers composable behaviors by solving a large and diverse number of autonomously generated tasks. Our method learns skills allowing the robot to consistently and robustly interact with objects in its environment. The discovered behaviors are embedded in primitives which can be composed with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning to solve unseen manipulation tasks. In particular, we leverage Asymmetric Self-Play to discover behaviors and Multiplicative Compositional Policies to embed them. We compare our method to Skill Learning baselines and find that our skills are more interactive. Furthermore, the learned skills can be used to solve a set of unseen manipulation tasks, in simulation as well as on a real robotic platform.
TimeCNN: Refining Cross-Variable Interaction on Time Point for Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Ao Hu, Dongkai Wang, Yong Dai, shiyi qi, Liangjian Wen, Jun Wang, Zhi Chen, Xun Zhou, Zenglin Xu, Jiang Duan
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting is extensively applied across diverse domains. Transformer-based models demonstrate significant potential in modeling cross-time and cross-variable interaction. However, we notice that the cross-variable correlation of multivariate time series demonstrates multifaceted (positive and negative correlations) and dynamic progression over time, which is not well captured by existing Transformer-based models. To address this issue, we propose a TimeCNN model to refine cross-variable interactions to enhance time series forecasting. Its key innovation is timepoint-independent, where each time point has an independent convolution kernel, allowing each time point to have its independent model to capture relationships among variables. This approach effectively handles both positive and negative correlations and adapts to the evolving nature of variable relationships over time. Extensive experiments conducted on 12 real-world datasets demonstrate that TimeCNN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models. Notably, our model achieves significant reductions in computational requirements (approximately 60.46%) and parameter count (about 57.50%), while delivering inference speeds 3 to 4 times faster than the benchmark iTransformer model
PostEdit: Posterior Sampling for Efficient Zero-Shot Image Editing
Authors: Feng Tian, Yixuan Li, Yichao Yan, Shanyan Guan, Yanhao Ge, Xiaokang Yang
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

In the field of image editing, three core challenges persist: controllability, background preservation, and efficiency. Inversion-based methods rely on time-consuming optimization to preserve the features of the initial images, which results in low efficiency due to the requirement for extensive network inference. Conversely, inversion-free methods lack theoretical support for background similarity, as they circumvent the issue of maintaining initial features to achieve efficiency. As a consequence, none of these methods can achieve both high efficiency and background consistency. To tackle the challenges and the aforementioned disadvantages, we introduce PostEdit, a method that incorporates a posterior scheme to govern the diffusion sampling process. Specifically, a corresponding measurement term related to both the initial features and Langevin dynamics is introduced to optimize the estimated image generated by the given target prompt. Extensive experimental results indicate that the proposed PostEdit achieves state-of-the-art editing performance while accurately preserving unedited regions. Furthermore, the method is both inversion- and training-free, necessitating approximately 1.5 seconds and 18 GB of GPU memory to generate high-quality results.
Multimodal Fusion Strategies for Mapping Biophysical Landscape Features
Authors: Lucia Gordon, Nico Lang, Catherine Ressijac, Andrew Davies
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixture-of-Experts

Multimodal aerial data are used to monitor natural systems, and machine learning can significantly accelerate the classification of landscape features within such imagery to benefit ecology and conservation. It remains under-explored, however, how these multiple modalities ought to be fused in a deep learning model. As a step towards filling this gap, we study three strategies (Early fusion, Late fusion, and Mixture of Experts) for fusing thermal, RGB, and LiDAR imagery using a dataset of spatially-aligned orthomosaics in these three modalities. In particular, we aim to map three ecologically-relevant biophysical landscape features in African savanna ecosystems: rhino middens, termite mounds, and water. The three fusion strategies differ in whether the modalities are fused early or late, and if late, whether the model learns fixed weights per modality for each class or generates weights for each class adaptively, based on the input. Overall, the three methods have similar macro-averaged performance with Late fusion achieving an AUC of 0.698, but their per-class performance varies strongly, with Early fusion achieving the best recall for middens and water and Mixture of Experts achieving the best recall for mounds.
Resource-Efficient Multiview Perception: Integrating Semantic Masking with Masked Autoencoders
Authors: Kosta Dakic, Kanchana Thilakarathna, Rodrigo N. Calheiros, Teng Joon Lim
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiview Detection, Scene Understanding

Multiview systems have become a key technology in modern computer vision, offering advanced capabilities in scene understanding and analysis. However, these systems face critical challenges in bandwidth limitations and computational constraints, particularly for resource-limited camera nodes like drones. This paper presents a novel approach for communication-efficient distributed multiview detection and tracking using masked autoencoders (MAEs). We introduce a semantic-guided masking strategy that leverages pre-trained segmentation models and a tunable power function to prioritize informative image regions. This approach, combined with an MAE, reduces communication overhead while preserving essential visual information. We evaluate our method on both virtual and real-world multiview datasets, demonstrating comparable performance in terms of detection and tracking performance metrics compared to state-of-the-art techniques, even at high masking ratios. Our selective masking algorithm outperforms random masking, maintaining higher accuracy and precision as the masking ratio increases. Furthermore, our approach achieves a significant reduction in transmission data volume compared to baseline methods, thereby balancing multiview tracking performance with communication efficiency.
A Review of BioTree Construction in the Context of Information Fusion: Priors, Methods, Applications and Trends
Authors: Zelin Zang, Yongjie Xu, Chenrui Duan, Yue Yuan, Jinlin Wu, Zhen Lei, Stan Z. Li
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Biological tree (BioTree) analysis is a foundational tool in biology, enabling the exploration of evolutionary and differentiation relationships among organisms, genes, and cells. Traditional tree construction methods, while instrumental in early research, face significant challenges in handling the growing complexity and scale of modern biological data, particularly in integrating multimodal datasets. Advances in deep learning (DL) offer transformative opportunities by enabling the fusion of biological prior knowledge with data-driven models. These approaches address key limitations of traditional methods, facilitating the construction of more accurate and interpretable BioTrees. This review highlights critical biological priors essential for phylogenetic and differentiation tree analyses and explores strategies for integrating these priors into DL models to enhance accuracy and interpretability. Additionally, the review systematically examines commonly used data modalities and databases, offering a valuable resource for developing and evaluating multimodal fusion models. Traditional tree construction methods are critically assessed, focusing on their biological assumptions, technical limitations, and scalability issues. Recent advancements in DL-based tree generation methods are reviewed, emphasizing their innovative approaches to multimodal integration and prior knowledge incorporation. Finally, the review discusses diverse applications of BioTrees in various biological disciplines, from phylogenetics to developmental biology, and outlines future trends in leveraging DL to advance BioTree research. By addressing the challenges of data complexity and prior knowledge integration, this review aims to inspire interdisciplinary innovation at the intersection of biology and DL.
Learning Interpretable Hierarchical Dynamical Systems Models from Time Series Data
Authors: Manuel Brenner, Elias Weber, Georgia Koppe, Daniel Durstewitz
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Transfer Learning

In science, we are often interested in obtaining a generative model of the underlying system dynamics from observed time series. While powerful methods for dynamical systems reconstruction (DSR) exist when data come from a single domain, how to best integrate data from multiple dynamical regimes and leverage it for generalization is still an open question. This becomes particularly important when individual time series are short, and group-level information may help to fill in for gaps in single-domain data. Here we introduce a hierarchical framework that enables to harvest group-level (multi-domain) information while retaining all single-domain characteristics, and showcase it on popular DSR benchmarks, as well as on neuroscience and medical data. In addition to faithful reconstruction of all individual dynamical regimes, our unsupervised methodology discovers common low-dimensional feature spaces in which datasets with similar dynamics cluster. The features spanning these spaces were further dynamically highly interpretable, surprisingly in often linear relation to control parameters that govern the dynamics of the underlying system. Finally, we illustrate transfer learning and generalization to new parameter regimes, paving the way toward DSR foundation models.
Transforming Color: A Novel Image Colorization Method
Authors: Hamza Shafiq, Bumshik Lee
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Colorization, Image Colorization

This paper introduces a novel method for image colorization that utilizes a color transformer and generative adversarial networks (GANs) to address the challenge of generating visually appealing colorized images. Conventional approaches often struggle with capturing long-range dependencies and producing realistic colorizations. The proposed method integrates a transformer architecture to capture global information and a GAN framework to improve visual quality. In this study, a color encoder that utilizes a random normal distribution to generate color features is applied. These features are then integrated with grayscale image features to enhance the overall representation of the images. Our method demonstrates superior performance compared with existing approaches by utilizing the capacity of the transformer, which can capture long-range dependencies and generate a realistic colorization of the GAN. Experimental results show that the proposed network significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art colorization techniques, highlighting its potential for image colorization. This research opens new possibilities for precise and visually compelling image colorization in domains such as digital restoration and historical image analysis.