High-quality face images are required to guarantee the stability and reliability of automatic face recognition (FR) systems in surveillance and security scenarios. However, a massive amount of face data is usually compressed before being analyzed due to limitations on transmission or storage. The compressed images may lose the powerful identity information, resulting in the performance degradation of the FR system. Herein, we make the first attempt to study just noticeable difference (JND) for the FR system, which can be defined as the maximum distortion that the FR system cannot notice. More specifically, we establish a JND dataset including 3530 original images and 137,670 compressed images generated by advanced reference encoding/decoding software based on the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard (VTM-15.0). Subsequently, we develop a novel JND prediction model to directly infer JND images for the FR system. In particular, in order to maximum redundancy removal without impairment of robust identity information, we apply the encoder with multiple feature extraction and attention-based feature decomposition modules to progressively decompose face features into two uncorrelated components, i.e., identity and residual features, via self-supervised learning. Then, the residual feature is fed into the decoder to generate the residual map. Finally, the predicted JND map is obtained by subtracting the residual map from the original image. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed model achieves higher accuracy of JND map prediction compared with the state-of-the-art JND models, and is capable of saving more bits while maintaining the performance of the FR system compared with VTM-15.0.
This paper proposes a new approach to achieve direct visual servoing (DVS) based on discrete orthogonal moments (DOMs). DVS is performed in such a way that the extraction of geometric primitives, matching, and tracking steps in the conventional feature-based visual servoing pipeline can be bypassed. Although DVS enables highly precise positioning, it suffers from a limited convergence domain and poor robustness due to the extreme nonlinearity of the cost function to be minimized and the presence of redundant data between visual features. To tackle these issues, we propose a generic and augmented framework that considers DOMs as visual features. By using the Tchebichef, Krawtchouk, and Hahn moments as examples, we not only present the strategies for adaptively tuning the parameters and order of the visual features but also exhibit an analytical formulation of the associated interaction matrix. Simulations demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of our approach, as well as its advantages over the state-of-the-art. Real-world experiments have also been performed to validate the effectiveness of our approach.
Sparse matrix representations are ubiquitous in computational science and machine learning, leading to significant reductions in compute time, in comparison to dense representation, for problems that have local connectivity. The adoption of sparse representation in leading ML frameworks such as PyTorch is incomplete, however, with support for both automatic differentiation and GPU acceleration missing. In this work, we present an implementation of a CSR-based sparse matrix wrapper for PyTorch with CUDA acceleration for basic matrix operations, as well as automatic differentiability. We also present several applications of the resulting sparse kernels to optimization problems, demonstrating ease of implementation and performance measurements versus their dense counterparts.
Probabilistic dependency graphs (PDGs) are a flexible class of probabilistic graphical models, subsuming Bayesian Networks and Factor Graphs. They can also capture inconsistent beliefs, and provide a way of measuring the degree of this inconsistency. We present the first tractable inference algorithm for PDGs with discrete variables, making the asymptotic complexity of PDG inference similar that of the graphical models they generalize. The key components are: (1) the observation that, in many cases, the distribution a PDG specifies can be formulated as a convex optimization problem (with exponential cone constraints), (2) a construction that allows us to express these problems compactly for PDGs of boundeed treewidth, (3) contributions to the theory of PDGs that justify the construction, and (4) an appeal to interior point methods that can solve such problems in polynomial time. We verify the correctness and complexity of our approach, and provide an implementation of it. We then evaluate our implementation, and demonstrate that it outperforms baseline approaches. Our code is available at //github.com/orichardson/pdg-infer-uai.
Denoising diffusion models have recently emerged as the predominant paradigm for generative modelling on image domains. In addition, their extension to Riemannian manifolds has facilitated a range of applications across the natural sciences. While many of these problems stand to benefit from the ability to specify arbitrary, domain-informed constraints, this setting is not covered by the existing (Riemannian) diffusion model methodology. Recent work has attempted to address this issue by constructing novel noising processes based on the reflected Brownian motion and logarithmic barrier methods. However, the associated samplers are either computationally burdensome or only apply to convex subsets of Euclidean space. In this paper, we introduce an alternative, simple noising scheme based on Metropolis sampling that affords substantial gains in computational efficiency and empirical performance compared to the earlier samplers. Of independent interest, we prove that this new process corresponds to a valid discretisation of the reflected Brownian motion. We demonstrate the scalability and flexibility of our approach on a range of problem settings with convex and non-convex constraints, including applications from geospatial modelling, robotics and protein design.
Current conversational agents (CA) have seen improvement in conversational quality in recent years due to the influence of large language models (LLMs) like GPT3. However, two key categories of problem remain. Firstly there are the unique technical problems resulting from the approach taken in creating the CA, such as scope with retrieval agents and the often nonsensical answers of former generative agents. Secondly, humans perceive CAs as social actors, and as a result expect the CA to adhere to social convention. Failure on the part of the CA in this respect can lead to a poor interaction and even the perception of threat by the user. As such, this paper presents a survey highlighting a potential solution to both categories of problem through the introduction of cognitively inspired additions to the CA. Through computational facsimiles of semantic and episodic memory, emotion, working memory, and the ability to learn, it is possible to address both the technical and social problems encountered by CAs.
Deep Gradient Leakage (DGL) is a highly effective attack that recovers private training images from gradient vectors. This attack casts significant privacy challenges on distributed learning from clients with sensitive data, where clients are required to share gradients. Defending against such attacks requires but lacks an understanding of when and how privacy leakage happens, mostly because of the black-box nature of deep networks. In this paper, we propose a novel Inversion Influence Function (I$^2$F) that establishes a closed-form connection between the recovered images and the private gradients by implicitly solving the DGL problem. Compared to directly solving DGL, I$^2$F is scalable for analyzing deep networks, requiring only oracle access to gradients and Jacobian-vector products. We empirically demonstrate that I$^2$F effectively approximated the DGL generally on different model architectures, datasets, attack implementations, and noise-based defenses. With this novel tool, we provide insights into effective gradient perturbation directions, the unfairness of privacy protection, and privacy-preferred model initialization. Our codes are provided in //github.com/illidanlab/inversion-influence-function.
Existing knowledge graph (KG) embedding models have primarily focused on static KGs. However, real-world KGs do not remain static, but rather evolve and grow in tandem with the development of KG applications. Consequently, new facts and previously unseen entities and relations continually emerge, necessitating an embedding model that can quickly learn and transfer new knowledge through growth. Motivated by this, we delve into an expanding field of KG embedding in this paper, i.e., lifelong KG embedding. We consider knowledge transfer and retention of the learning on growing snapshots of a KG without having to learn embeddings from scratch. The proposed model includes a masked KG autoencoder for embedding learning and update, with an embedding transfer strategy to inject the learned knowledge into the new entity and relation embeddings, and an embedding regularization method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. To investigate the impacts of different aspects of KG growth, we construct four datasets to evaluate the performance of lifelong KG embedding. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art inductive and lifelong embedding baselines.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Recent advances in maximizing mutual information (MI) between the source and target have demonstrated its effectiveness in text generation. However, previous works paid little attention to modeling the backward network of MI (i.e., dependency from the target to the source), which is crucial to the tightness of the variational information maximization lower bound. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Mutual Information (AMI): a text generation framework which is formed as a novel saddle point (min-max) optimization aiming to identify joint interactions between the source and target. Within this framework, the forward and backward networks are able to iteratively promote or demote each other's generated instances by comparing the real and synthetic data distributions. We also develop a latent noise sampling strategy that leverages random variations at the high-level semantic space to enhance the long term dependency in the generation process. Extensive experiments based on different text generation tasks demonstrate that the proposed AMI framework can significantly outperform several strong baselines, and we also show that AMI has potential to lead to a tighter lower bound of maximum mutual information for the variational information maximization problem.
The low resolution of objects of interest in aerial images makes pedestrian detection and action detection extremely challenging tasks. Furthermore, using deep convolutional neural networks to process large images can be demanding in terms of computational requirements. In order to alleviate these challenges, we propose a two-step, yes and no question answering framework to find specific individuals doing one or multiple specific actions in aerial images. First, a deep object detector, Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD), is used to generate object proposals from small aerial images. Second, another deep network, is used to learn a latent common sub-space which associates the high resolution aerial imagery and the pedestrian action labels that are provided by the human-based sources