Three dimensional electron back-scattered diffraction (EBSD) microscopy is a critical tool in many applications in materials science, yet its data quality can fluctuate greatly during the arduous collection process, particularly via serial-sectioning. Fortunately, 3D EBSD data is inherently sequential, opening up the opportunity to use transformers, state-of-the-art deep learning architectures that have made breakthroughs in a plethora of domains, for data processing and recovery. To be more robust to errors and accelerate this 3D EBSD data collection, we introduce a two step method that recovers missing slices in an 3D EBSD volume, using an efficient transformer model and a projection algorithm to process the transformer's outputs. Overcoming the computational and practical hurdles of deep learning with scarce high dimensional data, we train this model using only synthetic 3D EBSD data with self-supervision and obtain superior recovery accuracy on real 3D EBSD data, compared to existing methods.
The computational efficiency of many neural operators, widely used for learning solutions of PDEs, relies on the fast Fourier transform (FFT) for performing spectral computations. However, as FFT is limited to equispaced (rectangular) grids, this limits the efficiency of such neural operators when applied to problems where the input and output functions need to be processed on general non-equispaced point distributions. We address this issue by proposing a novel method that leverages batch matrix multiplications to efficiently construct Vandermonde-structured matrices and compute forward and inverse transforms, on arbitrarily distributed points. An efficient implementation of such structured matrix methods is coupled with existing neural operator models to allow the processing of data on arbitrary non-equispaced distributions of points. With extensive empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that the proposed method allows one to extend neural operators to very general point distributions with significant gains in training speed over baselines, while retaining or improving accuracy.
Anomaly detection has recently gained increasing attention in the field of computer vision, likely due to its broad set of applications ranging from product fault detection on industrial production lines and impending event detection in video surveillance to finding lesions in medical scans. Regardless of the domain, anomaly detection is typically framed as a one-class classification task, where the learning is conducted on normal examples only. An entire family of successful anomaly detection methods is based on learning to reconstruct masked normal inputs (e.g. patches, future frames, etc.) and exerting the magnitude of the reconstruction error as an indicator for the abnormality level. Unlike other reconstruction-based methods, we present a novel self-supervised masked convolutional transformer block (SSMCTB) that comprises the reconstruction-based functionality at a core architectural level. The proposed self-supervised block is extremely flexible, enabling information masking at any layer of a neural network and being compatible with a wide range of neural architectures. In this work, we extend our previous self-supervised predictive convolutional attentive block (SSPCAB) with a 3D masked convolutional layer, a transformer for channel-wise attention, as well as a novel self-supervised objective based on Huber loss. Furthermore, we show that our block is applicable to a wider variety of tasks, adding anomaly detection in medical images and thermal videos to the previously considered tasks based on RGB images and surveillance videos. We exhibit the generality and flexibility of SSMCTB by integrating it into multiple state-of-the-art neural models for anomaly detection, bringing forth empirical results that confirm considerable performance improvements on five benchmarks. We release our code and data as open source at: //github.com/ristea/ssmctb.
Privacy and Byzantine resilience (BR) are two crucial requirements of modern-day distributed machine learning. The two concepts have been extensively studied individually but the question of how to combine them effectively remains unanswered. This paper contributes to addressing this question by studying the extent to which the distributed SGD algorithm, in the standard parameter-server architecture, can learn an accurate model despite (a) a fraction of the workers being malicious (Byzantine), and (b) the other fraction, whilst being honest, providing noisy information to the server to ensure differential privacy (DP). We first observe that the integration of standard practices in DP and BR is not straightforward. In fact, we show that many existing results on the convergence of distributed SGD under Byzantine faults, especially those relying on $(\alpha,f)$-Byzantine resilience, are rendered invalid when honest workers enforce DP. To circumvent this shortcoming, we revisit the theory of $(\alpha,f)$-BR to obtain an approximate convergence guarantee. Our analysis provides key insights on how to improve this guarantee through hyperparameter optimization. Essentially, our theoretical and empirical results show that (1) an imprudent combination of standard approaches to DP and BR might be fruitless, but (2) by carefully re-tuning the learning algorithm, we can obtain reasonable learning accuracy while simultaneously guaranteeing DP and BR.
Audio adversarial examples are audio files that have been manipulated to fool an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, while still sounding benign to a human listener. Most methods to generate such samples are based on a two-step algorithm: first, a viable adversarial audio file is produced, then, this is fine-tuned with respect to perceptibility and robustness. In this work, we present an integrated algorithm that uses psychoacoustic models and room impulse responses (RIR) in the generation step. The RIRs are dynamically created by a neural network during the generation process to simulate a physical environment to harden our examples against transformations experienced in over-the-air attacks. We compare the different approaches in three experiments: in a simulated environment and in a realistic over-the-air scenario to evaluate the robustness, and in a human study to evaluate the perceptibility. Our algorithms considering psychoacoustics only or in addition to the robustness show an improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as well as in the human perception study, at the cost of an increased word error rate (WER).
Image-level weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) is a fundamental yet challenging computer vision task facilitating scene understanding and automatic driving. Most existing methods resort to classification-based Class Activation Maps (CAMs) to play as the initial pseudo labels, which tend to focus on the discriminative image regions and lack customized characteristics for the segmentation task. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel activation modulation and recalibration (AMR) scheme, which leverages a spotlight branch and a compensation branch to obtain weighted CAMs that can provide recalibration supervision and task-specific concepts. Specifically, an attention modulation module (AMM) is employed to rearrange the distribution of feature importance from the channel-spatial sequential perspective, which helps to explicitly model channel-wise interdependencies and spatial encodings to adaptively modulate segmentation-oriented activation responses. Furthermore, we introduce a cross pseudo supervision for dual branches, which can be regarded as a semantic similar regularization to mutually refine two branches. Extensive experiments show that AMR establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, surpassing not only current methods trained with the image-level of supervision but also some methods relying on stronger supervision, such as saliency label. Experiments also reveal that our scheme is plug-and-play and can be incorporated with other approaches to boost their performance.
Knowledge graph completion aims to predict missing relations between entities in a knowledge graph. While many different methods have been proposed, there is a lack of a unifying framework that would lead to state-of-the-art results. Here we develop PathCon, a knowledge graph completion method that harnesses four novel insights to outperform existing methods. PathCon predicts relations between a pair of entities by: (1) Considering the Relational Context of each entity by capturing the relation types adjacent to the entity and modeled through a novel edge-based message passing scheme; (2) Considering the Relational Paths capturing all paths between the two entities; And, (3) adaptively integrating the Relational Context and Relational Path through a learnable attention mechanism. Importantly, (4) in contrast to conventional node-based representations, PathCon represents context and path only using the relation types, which makes it applicable in an inductive setting. Experimental results on knowledge graph benchmarks as well as our newly proposed dataset show that PathCon outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge graph completion methods by a large margin. Finally, PathCon is able to provide interpretable explanations by identifying relations that provide the context and paths that are important for a given predicted relation.
Dynamic programming (DP) solves a variety of structured combinatorial problems by iteratively breaking them down into smaller subproblems. In spite of their versatility, DP algorithms are usually non-differentiable, which hampers their use as a layer in neural networks trained by backpropagation. To address this issue, we propose to smooth the max operator in the dynamic programming recursion, using a strongly convex regularizer. This allows to relax both the optimal value and solution of the original combinatorial problem, and turns a broad class of DP algorithms into differentiable operators. Theoretically, we provide a new probabilistic perspective on backpropagating through these DP operators, and relate them to inference in graphical models. We derive two particular instantiations of our framework, a smoothed Viterbi algorithm for sequence prediction and a smoothed DTW algorithm for time-series alignment. We showcase these instantiations on two structured prediction tasks and on structured and sparse attention for neural machine translation.
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples resulting from adding small-magnitude perturbations to inputs. Such adversarial examples can mislead DNNs to produce adversary-selected results. Different attack strategies have been proposed to generate adversarial examples, but how to produce them with high perceptual quality and more efficiently requires more research efforts. In this paper, we propose AdvGAN to generate adversarial examples with generative adversarial networks (GANs), which can learn and approximate the distribution of original instances. For AdvGAN, once the generator is trained, it can generate adversarial perturbations efficiently for any instance, so as to potentially accelerate adversarial training as defenses. We apply AdvGAN in both semi-whitebox and black-box attack settings. In semi-whitebox attacks, there is no need to access the original target model after the generator is trained, in contrast to traditional white-box attacks. In black-box attacks, we dynamically train a distilled model for the black-box model and optimize the generator accordingly. Adversarial examples generated by AdvGAN on different target models have high attack success rate under state-of-the-art defenses compared to other attacks. Our attack has placed the first with 92.76% accuracy on a public MNIST black-box attack challenge.
Image segmentation is considered to be one of the critical tasks in hyperspectral remote sensing image processing. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has established itself as a powerful model in segmentation and classification by demonstrating excellent performances. The use of a graphical model such as a conditional random field (CRF) contributes further in capturing contextual information and thus improving the segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a method to segment hyperspectral images by considering both spectral and spatial information via a combined framework consisting of CNN and CRF. We use multiple spectral cubes to learn deep features using CNN, and then formulate deep CRF with CNN-based unary and pairwise potential functions to effectively extract the semantic correlations between patches consisting of three-dimensional data cubes. Effective piecewise training is applied in order to avoid the computationally expensive iterative CRF inference. Furthermore, we introduce a deep deconvolution network that improves the segmentation masks. We also introduce a new dataset and experimented our proposed method on it along with several widely adopted benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. By comparing our results with those from several state-of-the-art models, we show the promising potential of our method.