Whereas the ability of deep networks to produce useful predictions has been amply demonstrated, estimating the reliability of these predictions remains challenging. Sampling approaches such as MC-Dropout and Deep Ensembles have emerged as the most popular ones for this purpose. Unfortunately, they require many forward passes at inference time, which slows them down. Sampling-free approaches can be faster but suffer from other drawbacks, such as lower reliability of uncertainty estimates, difficulty of use, and limited applicability to different types of tasks and data. In this work, we introduce a sampling-free approach that is generic and easy to deploy, while producing reliable uncertainty estimates on par with state-of-the-art methods at a significantly lower computational cost. It is predicated on training the network to produce the same output with and without additional information about it. At inference time, when no prior information is given, we use the network's own prediction as the additional information. We then take the distance between the predictions with and without prior information as our uncertainty measure. We demonstrate our approach on several classification and regression tasks. We show that it delivers results on par with those of Ensembles but at a much lower computational cost.
In contrastive self-supervised learning, positive samples are typically drawn from the same image but in different augmented views, resulting in a relatively limited source of positive samples. An effective way to alleviate this problem is to incorporate the relationship between samples, which involves including the top-k nearest neighbors of positive samples in the framework. However, the problem of false neighbors (i.e., neighbors that do not belong to the same category as the positive sample) is an objective but often overlooked challenge due to the query of neighbor samples without human supervision. In this paper, we present a simple Self-supervised learning framework called Mixed Nearest-Neighbors for Self-Supervised Learning (MNN). MNN optimizes the influence of neighbor samples on the semantics of positive samples through an intuitive weighting approach and image mixture operations. The results of our study demonstrate that MNN exhibits exceptional generalization performance and training efficiency on four benchmark datasets.
While multi-exit neural networks are regarded as a promising solution for making efficient inference via early exits, combating adversarial attacks remains a challenging problem. In multi-exit networks, due to the high dependency among different submodels, an adversarial example targeting a specific exit not only degrades the performance of the target exit but also reduces the performance of all other exits concurrently. This makes multi-exit networks highly vulnerable to simple adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose NEO-KD, a knowledge-distillation-based adversarial training strategy that tackles this fundamental challenge based on two key contributions. NEO-KD first resorts to neighbor knowledge distillation to guide the output of the adversarial examples to tend to the ensemble outputs of neighbor exits of clean data. NEO-KD also employs exit-wise orthogonal knowledge distillation for reducing adversarial transferability across different submodels. The result is a significantly improved robustness against adversarial attacks. Experimental results on various datasets/models show that our method achieves the best adversarial accuracy with reduced computation budgets, compared to the baselines relying on existing adversarial training or knowledge distillation techniques for multi-exit networks.
Deep neural networks are susceptible to adversarial attacks, which pose a significant threat to their security and reliability in real-world applications. The most notable adversarial attacks are transfer-based attacks, where an adversary crafts an adversarial example to fool one model, which can also fool other models. While previous research has made progress in improving the transferability of untargeted adversarial examples, the generation of targeted adversarial examples that can transfer between models remains a challenging task. In this work, we present a novel approach to generate transferable targeted adversarial examples by exploiting the vulnerability of deep neural networks to perturbations on high-frequency components of images. We observe that replacing the high-frequency component of an image with that of another image can mislead deep models, motivating us to craft perturbations containing high-frequency information to achieve targeted attacks. To this end, we propose a method called Low-Frequency Adversarial Attack (\name), which trains a conditional generator to generate targeted adversarial perturbations that are then added to the low-frequency component of the image. Extensive experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, improving targeted attack success rates by a margin from 3.2\% to 15.5\%.
Anomaly detection in time series data, to identify points that deviate from normal behaviour, is a common problem in various domains such as manufacturing, medical imaging, and cybersecurity. Recently, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are shown to be effective in detecting anomalies in time series data. The neural network architecture of GANs (i.e. Generator and Discriminator) can significantly improve anomaly detection accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new GAN model, named Adjusted-LSTM GAN (ALGAN), which adjusts the output of an LSTM network for improved anomaly detection in both univariate and multivariate time series data in an unsupervised setting. We evaluate the performance of ALGAN on 46 real-world univariate time series datasets and a large multivariate dataset that spans multiple domains. Our experiments demonstrate that ALGAN outperforms traditional, neural network-based, and other GAN-based methods for anomaly detection in time series data.
Gaze tracking devices have the potential to greatly expand interactivity, yet miscalibration remains a significant barrier to use. As devices miscalibrate, people tend to compensate by intentionally offsetting their gaze, which makes detecting miscalibration from eye signals difficult. To help address this problem, we propose a novel approach to seamless calibration based on the insight that the system's model of eye gaze can be updated during reading (user does not compensate) to improve calibration for typing (user might compensate). To explore this approach, we built an auto-calibrating gaze typing prototype called EyeO, ran a user study with 20 participants, and conducted a semi-structured interview with 6 ALS community stakeholders. Our user study results suggest that seamless autocalibration can significantly improve typing efficiency and user experience. Findings from the semi-structured interview validate the need for autocalibration, and shed light on the prototype's potential usefulness, desired algorithmic and design improvements for users.
The graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been applied to model the physically connected and non-local relations among human joints for 3D human pose estimation (HPE). In addition, the purely Transformer-based models recently show promising results in video-based 3D HPE. However, the single-frame method still needs to model the physically connected relations among joints because the feature representations transformed only by global relations via the Transformer neglect information on the human skeleton. To deal with this problem, we propose a novel method in which the Transformer encoder and GCN blocks are alternately stacked, namely AMPose, to combine the global and physically connected relations among joints towards HPE. In the AMPose, the Transformer encoder is applied to connect each joint with all the other joints, while GCNs are applied to capture information on physically connected relations. The effectiveness of our proposed method is evaluated on the Human3.6M dataset. Our model also shows better generalization ability by testing on the MPI-INF-3DHP dataset. Code can be retrieved at //github.com/erikervalid/AMPose.
Faults occurring in ad-hoc robot networks may fatally perturb their topologies leading to disconnection of subsets of those networks. Optimal topology synthesis is generally resource-intensive and time-consuming to be done in real time for large ad-hoc robot networks. One should only perform topology re-computations if the probability of topology recoverability after the occurrence of any fault surpasses that of its irrecoverability. We formulate this problem as a binary classification problem. Then, we develop a two-pathway data-driven model based on Bayesian Gaussian mixture models that predicts the solution to a typical problem by two different pre-fault and post-fault prediction pathways. The results, obtained by the integration of the predictions of those pathways, clearly indicate the success of our model in solving the topology (ir)recoverability prediction problem compared to the best of current strategies found in the literature.
Conventionally, spatiotemporal modeling network and its complexity are the two most concentrated research topics in video action recognition. Existing state-of-the-art methods have achieved excellent accuracy regardless of the complexity meanwhile efficient spatiotemporal modeling solutions are slightly inferior in performance. In this paper, we attempt to acquire both efficiency and effectiveness simultaneously. First of all, besides traditionally treating H x W x T video frames as space-time signal (viewing from the Height-Width spatial plane), we propose to also model video from the other two Height-Time and Width-Time planes, to capture the dynamics of video thoroughly. Secondly, our model is designed based on 2D CNN backbones and model complexity is well kept in mind by design. Specifically, we introduce a novel multi-view fusion (MVF) module to exploit video dynamics using separable convolution for efficiency. It is a plug-and-play module and can be inserted into off-the-shelf 2D CNNs to form a simple yet effective model called MVFNet. Moreover, MVFNet can be thought of as a generalized video modeling framework and it can specialize to be existing methods such as C2D, SlowOnly, and TSM under different settings. Extensive experiments are conducted on popular benchmarks (i.e., Something-Something V1 & V2, Kinetics, UCF-101, and HMDB-51) to show its superiority. The proposed MVFNet can achieve state-of-the-art performance with 2D CNN's complexity.
Since real-world objects and their interactions are often multi-modal and multi-typed, heterogeneous networks have been widely used as a more powerful, realistic, and generic superclass of traditional homogeneous networks (graphs). Meanwhile, representation learning (\aka~embedding) has recently been intensively studied and shown effective for various network mining and analytical tasks. In this work, we aim to provide a unified framework to deeply summarize and evaluate existing research on heterogeneous network embedding (HNE), which includes but goes beyond a normal survey. Since there has already been a broad body of HNE algorithms, as the first contribution of this work, we provide a generic paradigm for the systematic categorization and analysis over the merits of various existing HNE algorithms. Moreover, existing HNE algorithms, though mostly claimed generic, are often evaluated on different datasets. Understandable due to the application favor of HNE, such indirect comparisons largely hinder the proper attribution of improved task performance towards effective data preprocessing and novel technical design, especially considering the various ways possible to construct a heterogeneous network from real-world application data. Therefore, as the second contribution, we create four benchmark datasets with various properties regarding scale, structure, attribute/label availability, and \etc.~from different sources, towards handy and fair evaluations of HNE algorithms. As the third contribution, we carefully refactor and amend the implementations and create friendly interfaces for 13 popular HNE algorithms, and provide all-around comparisons among them over multiple tasks and experimental settings.
Recently, neural networks have been widely used in e-commerce recommender systems, owing to the rapid development of deep learning. We formalize the recommender system as a sequential recommendation problem, intending to predict the next items that the user might be interacted with. Recent works usually give an overall embedding from a user's behavior sequence. However, a unified user embedding cannot reflect the user's multiple interests during a period. In this paper, we propose a novel controllable multi-interest framework for the sequential recommendation, called ComiRec. Our multi-interest module captures multiple interests from user behavior sequences, which can be exploited for retrieving candidate items from the large-scale item pool. These items are then fed into an aggregation module to obtain the overall recommendation. The aggregation module leverages a controllable factor to balance the recommendation accuracy and diversity. We conduct experiments for the sequential recommendation on two real-world datasets, Amazon and Taobao. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art models. Our framework has also been successfully deployed on the offline Alibaba distributed cloud platform.