The prominence of embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI), which empowers robots to navigate, perceive, and engage within virtual environments, has attracted significant attention, owing to the remarkable advancements in computer vision and large language models. Privacy emerges as a pivotal concern within the realm of embodied AI, as the robot access substantial personal information. However, the issue of privacy leakage in embodied AI tasks, particularly in relation to decision-making algorithms, has not received adequate consideration in research. This paper aims to address this gap by proposing an attack on the Deep Q-Learning algorithm, utilizing gradient inversion to reconstruct states, actions, and Q-values. The choice of using gradients for the attack is motivated by the fact that commonly employed federated learning techniques solely utilize gradients computed based on private user data to optimize models, without storing or transmitting the data to public servers. Nevertheless, these gradients contain sufficient information to potentially expose private data. To validate our approach, we conduct experiments on the AI2THOR simulator and evaluate our algorithm on active perception, a prevalent task in embodied AI. The experimental results convincingly demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in successfully recovering all information from the data across all 120 room layouts.
There are now many adversarial attacks for natural language processing systems. Of these, a vast majority achieve success by modifying individual document tokens, which we call here a token-modification attack. Each token-modification attack is defined by a specific combination of fundamental components, such as a constraint on the adversary or a particular search algorithm. Motivated by this observation, we survey existing token-modification attacks and extract the components of each. We use an attack-independent framework to structure our survey which results in an effective categorisation of the field and an easy comparison of components. This survey aims to guide new researchers to this field and spark further research into individual attack components.
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on various computer vision applications. However, these models have considerable storage and computational overheads, making their deployment and efficient inference on edge devices challenging. Quantization is a promising approach to reducing model complexity, and the dyadic arithmetic pipeline can allow the quantized models to perform efficient integer-only inference. Unfortunately, dyadic arithmetic is based on the homogeneity condition in convolutional neural networks, which is not applicable to the non-linear components in ViTs, making integer-only inference of ViTs an open issue. In this paper, we propose I-ViT, an integer-only quantization scheme for ViTs, to enable ViTs to perform the entire computational graph of inference with integer arithmetic and bit-shifting, and without any floating-point arithmetic. In I-ViT, linear operations (e.g., MatMul and Dense) follow the integer-only pipeline with dyadic arithmetic, and non-linear operations (e.g., Softmax, GELU, and LayerNorm) are approximated by the proposed light-weight integer-only arithmetic methods. More specifically, I-ViT applies the proposed Shiftmax and ShiftGELU, which are designed to use integer bit-shifting to approximate the corresponding floating-point operations. We evaluate I-ViT on various benchmark models and the results show that integer-only INT8 quantization achieves comparable (or even slightly higher) accuracy to the full-precision (FP) baseline. Furthermore, we utilize TVM for practical hardware deployment on the GPU's integer arithmetic units, achieving 3.72$\sim$4.11$\times$ inference speedup compared to the FP model. Code of both Pytorch and TVM is released at //github.com/zkkli/I-ViT.
With the increasing availability and affordability of personal robots, they will no longer be confined to large corporate warehouses or factories but will instead be expected to operate in less controlled environments alongside larger groups of people. In addition to ensuring safety and efficiency, it is crucial to minimize any negative psychological impact robots may have on humans and follow unwritten social norms in these situations. Our research aims to develop a model that can predict the movements of pedestrians and perceptually-social groups in crowded environments. We introduce a new Social Group Long Short-term Memory (SG-LSTM) model that models human groups and interactions in dense environments using a socially-aware LSTM to produce more accurate trajectory predictions. Our approach enables navigation algorithms to calculate collision-free paths faster and more accurately in crowded environments. Additionally, we also release a large video dataset with labeled pedestrian groups for the broader social navigation community. We show comparisons with different metrics on different datasets (ETH, Hotel, MOT15) and different prediction approaches (LIN, LSTM, O-LSTM, S-LSTM) as well as runtime performance.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have so far impressed the world, with unprecedented capabilities that emerge in models at large scales. On the vision side, transformer models (i.e., ViT) are following the same trend, achieving the best performance on challenging benchmarks. With the abundance of such unimodal models, a natural question arises; do we need also to follow this trend to tackle multimodal tasks? In this work, we propose to rather direct effort to efficient adaptations of existing models, and propose to augment Language Models with perception. Existing approaches for adapting pretrained models for vision-language tasks still rely on several key components that hinder their efficiency. In particular, they still train a large number of parameters, rely on large multimodal pretraining, use encoders (e.g., CLIP) trained on huge image-text datasets, and add significant inference overhead. In addition, most of these approaches have focused on Zero-Shot and In Context Learning, with little to no effort on direct finetuning. We investigate the minimal computational effort needed to adapt unimodal models for multimodal tasks and propose a new challenging setup, alongside different approaches, that efficiently adapts unimodal pretrained models. We show that by freezing more than 99% of total parameters, training only one linear projection layer, and prepending only one trainable token, our approach (dubbed eP-ALM) significantly outperforms other baselines on VQA and Captioning across Image, Video, and Audio modalities, following the proposed setup. The code is available here: //github.com/mshukor/eP-ALM.
Biomimetic, dexterous robotic hands have the potential to replicate much of the tasks that a human can do, and to achieve status as a general manipulation platform. Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks have achieved remarkable performance in quadrupedal locomotion and dexterous manipulation tasks. Combined with GPU-based highly parallelized simulations capable of simulating thousands of robots in parallel, RL-based controllers have become more scalable and approachable. However, in order to bring RL-trained policies to the real world, we require training frameworks that output policies that can work with physical actuators and sensors as well as a hardware platform that can be manufactured with accessible materials yet is robust enough to run interactive policies. This work introduces the biomimetic tendon-driven Faive Hand and its system architecture, which uses tendon-driven rolling contact joints to achieve a 3D printable, robust high-DoF hand design. We model each element of the hand and integrate it into a GPU simulation environment to train a policy with RL, and achieve zero-shot transfer of a dexterous in-hand sphere rotation skill to the physical robot hand.
Benefiting from the sequence-level knowledge distillation, the Non-Autoregressive Transformer (NAT) achieves great success in neural machine translation tasks. However, existing knowledge distillation has side effects, such as propagating errors from the teacher to NAT students, which may limit further improvements of NAT models and are rarely discussed in existing research. In this paper, we introduce selective knowledge distillation by introducing an NAT evaluator to select NAT-friendly targets that are of high quality and easy to learn. In addition, we introduce a simple yet effective progressive distillation method to boost NAT performance. Experiment results on multiple WMT language directions and several representative NAT models show that our approach can realize a flexible trade-off between the quality and complexity of training data for NAT models, achieving strong performances. Further analysis shows that distilling only 5% of the raw translations can help an NAT outperform its counterpart trained on raw data by about 2.4 BLEU.
We endeavor on a rarely explored task named Insubstantial Object Detection (IOD), which aims to localize the object with following characteristics: (1) amorphous shape with indistinct boundary; (2) similarity to surroundings; (3) absence in color. Accordingly, it is far more challenging to distinguish insubstantial objects in a single static frame and the collaborative representation of spatial and temporal information is crucial. Thus, we construct an IOD-Video dataset comprised of 600 videos (141,017 frames) covering various distances, sizes, visibility, and scenes captured by different spectral ranges. In addition, we develop a spatio-temporal aggregation framework for IOD, in which different backbones are deployed and a spatio-temporal aggregation loss (STAloss) is elaborately designed to leverage the consistency along the time axis. Experiments conducted on IOD-Video dataset demonstrate that spatio-temporal aggregation can significantly improve the performance of IOD. We hope our work will attract further researches into this valuable yet challenging task. The code will be available at: \url{//github.com/CalayZhou/IOD-Video}.
Planning safe trajectories in Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) is a complex problem to solve in real-time. The main challenge to solve this problem arises from the various conditions and constraints imposed by road geometry, semantics and traffic rules, as well as the presence of dynamic agents. Recently, Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) has shown to be an effective framework for optimal motion planning and control in robot navigation in unstructured and highly uncertain environments. In this paper, we formulate the motion planning problem in ADS as a nonlinear stochastic dynamic optimization problem that can be solved using an MPPI strategy. The main technical contribution of this work is a method to handle obstacles within the MPPI formulation safely. In this method, obstacles are approximated by circles that can be easily integrated into the MPPI cost formulation while considering safety margins. The proposed MPPI framework has been efficiently implemented in our autonomous vehicle and experimentally validated using three different primitive scenarios. Experimental results show that generated trajectories are safe, feasible and perfectly achieve the planning objective. The video results as well as the open-source implementation are available at: //gitlab.uni.lu/360lab-public/mppi
Deep hiding, embedding images with others using deep neural networks, has demonstrated impressive efficacy in increasing the message capacity and robustness of secret sharing. In this paper, we challenge the robustness of existing deep hiding schemes by preventing the recovery of secret images, building on our in-depth study of state-of-the-art deep hiding schemes and their vulnerabilities. Leveraging our analysis, we first propose a simple box-free removal attack on deep hiding that does not require any prior knowledge of the deep hiding schemes. To improve the removal performance on the deep hiding schemes that may be enhanced by adversarial training, we further design a more powerful removal attack, efficient box-free removal attack (EBRA), which employs image inpainting techniques to remove secret images from container images. In addition, to ensure the effectiveness of our attack and preserve the fidelity of the processed container images, we design an erasing phase based on the locality of deep hiding to remove secret information and then make full use of the visual information of container images to repair the erased visual content. Extensive evaluations show our method can completely remove secret images from container images with negligible impact on the quality of container images.
An in-depth understanding of uncertainty is the first step to making effective decisions under uncertainty. Deep/machine learning (ML/DL) has been hugely leveraged to solve complex problems involved with processing high-dimensional data. However, reasoning and quantifying different types of uncertainties to achieve effective decision-making have been much less explored in ML/DL than in other Artificial Intelligence (AI) domains. In particular, belief/evidence theories have been studied in KRR since the 1960s to reason and measure uncertainties to enhance decision-making effectiveness. We found that only a few studies have leveraged the mature uncertainty research in belief/evidence theories in ML/DL to tackle complex problems under different types of uncertainty. In this survey paper, we discuss several popular belief theories and their core ideas dealing with uncertainty causes and types and quantifying them, along with the discussions of their applicability in ML/DL. In addition, we discuss three main approaches that leverage belief theories in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), including Evidential DNNs, Fuzzy DNNs, and Rough DNNs, in terms of their uncertainty causes, types, and quantification methods along with their applicability in diverse problem domains. Based on our in-depth survey, we discuss insights, lessons learned, limitations of the current state-of-the-art bridging belief theories and ML/DL, and finally, future research directions.