The growth of low-end hardware has led to a proliferation of machine learning-based services in edge applications. These applications gather contextual information about users and provide some services, such as personalized offers, through a machine learning (ML) model. A growing practice has been to deploy such ML models on the user's device to reduce latency, maintain user privacy, and minimize continuous reliance on a centralized source. However, deploying ML models on the user's edge device can leak proprietary information about the service provider. In this work, we investigate on-device ML models that are used to provide mobile services and demonstrate how simple attacks can leak proprietary information of the service provider. We show that different adversaries can easily exploit such models to maximize their profit and accomplish content theft. Motivated by the need to thwart such attacks, we present an end-to-end framework, SODA, for deploying and serving on edge devices while defending against adversarial usage. Our results demonstrate that SODA can detect adversarial usage with 89% accuracy in less than 50 queries with minimal impact on service performance, latency, and storage.
The rapid development in the field of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a surge in applications that facilitate collaboration among multiple agents to assist humans in their daily tasks. However, a significant gap remains in assessing whether LLM-powered applications genuinely enhance user experience and task execution efficiency. This highlights the pressing need for methods to verify utility of LLM-powered applications, particularly by ensuring alignment between the application's functionality and end-user needs. We introduce AgentEval provides an implementation for the math problems}, a novel framework designed to simplify the utility verification process by automatically proposing a set of criteria tailored to the unique purpose of any given application. This allows for a comprehensive assessment, quantifying the utility of an application against the suggested criteria. We present a comprehensive analysis of the robustness of quantifier's work.
Finding errors in machine learning applications requires a thorough exploration of their behavior over data. Existing approaches used by practitioners are often ad-hoc and lack the abstractions needed to scale this process. We present TorchQL, a programming framework to evaluate and improve the correctness of machine learning applications. TorchQL allows users to write queries to specify and check integrity constraints over machine learning models and datasets. It seamlessly integrates relational algebra with functional programming to allow for highly expressive queries using only eight intuitive operators. We evaluate TorchQL on diverse use-cases including finding critical temporal inconsistencies in objects detected across video frames in autonomous driving, finding data imputation errors in time-series medical records, finding data labeling errors in real-world images, and evaluating biases and constraining outputs of language models. Our experiments show that TorchQL enables up to 13x faster query executions than baselines like Pandas and MongoDB, and up to 40% shorter queries than native Python. We also conduct a user study and find that TorchQL is natural enough for developers familiar with Python to specify complex integrity constraints.
Face swapping has gained significant attention for its varied applications. The majority of previous face swapping approaches have relied on the seesaw game training scheme, which often leads to the instability of the model training and results in undesired samples with blended identities due to the target identity leakage problem. This paper introduces the Shape Agnostic Masked AutoEncoder (SAMAE) training scheme, a novel self-supervised approach designed to enhance face swapping model training. Our training scheme addresses the limitations of traditional training methods by circumventing the conventional seesaw game and introducing clear ground truth through its self-reconstruction training regime. It effectively mitigates identity leakage by masking facial regions of the input images and utilizing learned disentangled identity and non-identity features. Additionally, we tackle the shape misalignment problem with new techniques including perforation confusion and random mesh scaling, and establishes a new state-of-the-art, surpassing other baseline methods, preserving both identity and non-identity attributes, without sacrificing on either aspect.
Trajectory planning is a fundamental problem in robotics. It facilitates a wide range of applications in navigation and motion planning, control, and multi-agent coordination. Trajectory planning is a difficult problem due to its computational complexity and real-world environment complexity with uncertainty, non-linearity, and real-time requirements. The multi-agent trajectory planning problem adds another dimension of difficulty due to inter-agent interaction. Existing solutions are either search-based or optimization-based approaches with simplified assumptions of environment, limited planning speed, and limited scalability in the number of agents. In this work, we make the first attempt to reformulate single agent and multi-agent trajectory planning problem as query problems over an implicit neural representation of trajectories. We formulate such implicit representation as Neural Trajectory Models (NTM) which can be queried to generate nearly optimal trajectory in complex environments. We conduct experiments in simulation environments and demonstrate that NTM can solve single-agent and multi-agent trajectory planning problems. In the experiments, NTMs achieve (1) sub-millisecond panning time using GPUs, (2) almost avoiding all environment collision, (3) almost avoiding all inter-agent collision, and (4) generating almost shortest paths. We also demonstrate that the same NTM framework can also be used for trajectories correction and multi-trajectory conflict resolution refining low quality and conflicting multi-agent trajectories into nearly optimal solutions efficiently. (Open source code will be available at //github.com/laser2099/neural-trajectory-model)
In unknown cluttered and dynamic environments such as disaster scenes, mobile robots need to perform target-driven navigation in order to find people or objects of interest, while being solely guided by images of the targets. In this paper, we introduce NavFormer, a novel end-to-end transformer architecture developed for robot target-driven navigation in unknown and dynamic environments. NavFormer leverages the strengths of both 1) transformers for sequential data processing and 2) self-supervised learning (SSL) for visual representation to reason about spatial layouts and to perform collision-avoidance in dynamic settings. The architecture uniquely combines dual-visual encoders consisting of a static encoder for extracting invariant environment features for spatial reasoning, and a general encoder for dynamic obstacle avoidance. The primary robot navigation task is decomposed into two sub-tasks for training: single robot exploration and multi-robot collision avoidance. We perform cross-task training to enable the transfer of learned skills to the complex primary navigation task without the need for task-specific fine-tuning. Simulated experiments demonstrate that NavFormer can effectively navigate a mobile robot in diverse unknown environments, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of success rate and success weighted by (normalized inverse) path length. Furthermore, a comprehensive ablation study is performed to evaluate the impact of the main design choices of the structure and training of NavFormer, further validating their effectiveness in the overall system.
The rise of IoT devices has prompted the demand for deploying machine learning at-the-edge with real-time, efficient, and secure data processing. In this context, implementing machine learning (ML) models with real-valued weight parameters can prove to be impractical particularly for large models, and there is a need to train models with quantized discrete weights. At the same time, these low-dimensional models also need to preserve privacy of the underlying dataset. In this work, we present RQP-SGD, a new approach for privacy-preserving quantization to train machine learning models for low-memory ML-at-the-edge. This approach combines differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) with randomized quantization, providing a measurable privacy guarantee in machine learning. In particular, we study the utility convergence of implementing RQP-SGD on ML tasks with convex objectives and quantization constraints and demonstrate its efficacy over deterministic quantization. Through experiments conducted on two datasets, we show the practical effectiveness of RQP-SGD.
Deep learning techniques have led to remarkable breakthroughs in the field of generic object detection and have spawned a lot of scene-understanding tasks in recent years. Scene graph has been the focus of research because of its powerful semantic representation and applications to scene understanding. Scene Graph Generation (SGG) refers to the task of automatically mapping an image into a semantic structural scene graph, which requires the correct labeling of detected objects and their relationships. Although this is a challenging task, the community has proposed a lot of SGG approaches and achieved good results. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of recent achievements in this field brought about by deep learning techniques. We review 138 representative works that cover different input modalities, and systematically summarize existing methods of image-based SGG from the perspective of feature extraction and fusion. We attempt to connect and systematize the existing visual relationship detection methods, to summarize, and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies of SGG in a comprehensive way. Finally, we finish this survey with deep discussions about current existing problems and future research directions. This survey will help readers to develop a better understanding of the current research status and ideas.
Deep Learning has implemented a wide range of applications and has become increasingly popular in recent years. The goal of multimodal deep learning is to create models that can process and link information using various modalities. Despite the extensive development made for unimodal learning, it still cannot cover all the aspects of human learning. Multimodal learning helps to understand and analyze better when various senses are engaged in the processing of information. This paper focuses on multiple types of modalities, i.e., image, video, text, audio, body gestures, facial expressions, and physiological signals. Detailed analysis of past and current baseline approaches and an in-depth study of recent advancements in multimodal deep learning applications has been provided. A fine-grained taxonomy of various multimodal deep learning applications is proposed, elaborating on different applications in more depth. Architectures and datasets used in these applications are also discussed, along with their evaluation metrics. Last, main issues are highlighted separately for each domain along with their possible future research directions.
Search engine has become a fundamental component in various web and mobile applications. Retrieving relevant documents from the massive datasets is challenging for a search engine system, especially when faced with verbose or tail queries. In this paper, we explore a vector space search framework for document retrieval. Specifically, we trained a deep semantic matching model so that each query and document can be encoded as a low dimensional embedding. Our model was trained based on BERT architecture. We deployed a fast k-nearest-neighbor index service for online serving. Both offline and online metrics demonstrate that our method improved retrieval performance and search quality considerably, particularly for tail
The rapid advancements in machine learning, graphics processing technologies and availability of medical imaging data has led to a rapid increase in use of machine learning models in the medical domain. This was exacerbated by the rapid advancements in convolutional neural network (CNN) based architectures, which were adopted by the medical imaging community to assist clinicians in disease diagnosis. Since the grand success of AlexNet in 2012, CNNs have been increasingly used in medical image analysis to improve the efficiency of human clinicians. In recent years, three-dimensional (3D) CNNs have been employed for analysis of medical images. In this paper, we trace the history of how the 3D CNN was developed from its machine learning roots, brief mathematical description of 3D CNN and the preprocessing steps required for medical images before feeding them to 3D CNNs. We review the significant research in the field of 3D medical imaging analysis using 3D CNNs (and its variants) in different medical areas such as classification, segmentation, detection, and localization. We conclude by discussing the challenges associated with the use of 3D CNNs in the medical imaging domain (and the use of deep learning models, in general) and possible future trends in the field.