The area under receiver operating characteristics (AUC) is the standard measure for comparison of anomaly detectors. Its advantage is in providing a scalar number that allows a natural ordering and is independent on a threshold, which allows to postpone the choice. In this work, we question whether AUC is a good metric for anomaly detection, or if it gives a false sense of comfort, due to relying on assumptions which are unlikely to hold in practice. Our investigation shows that variations of AUC emphasizing accuracy at low false positive rate seem to be better correlated with the needs of practitioners, but also that we can compare anomaly detectors only in the case when we have representative examples of anomalous samples. This last result is disturbing, as it suggests that in many cases, we should do active or few-show learning instead of pure anomaly detection.
Many multivariate data sets exhibit a form of positive dependence, which can either appear globally between all variables or only locally within particular subgroups. A popular notion of positive dependence that allows for localized positivity is positive association. In this work we introduce the notion of extremal positive association for multivariate extremes from threshold exceedances. Via a sufficient condition for extremal association, we show that extremal association generalizes extremal tree models. For H\"usler--Reiss distributions the sufficient condition permits a parametric description that we call the metric property. As the parameter of a H\"usler--Reiss distribution is a Euclidean distance matrix, the metric property relates to research in electrical network theory and Euclidean geometry. We show that the metric property can be localized with respect to a graph and study surrogate likelihood inference. This gives rise to a two-step estimation procedure for locally metrical H\"usler--Reiss graphical models. The second step allows for a simple dual problem, which is implemented via a gradient descent algorithm. Finally, we demonstrate our results on simulated and real data.
Quantiles and expectiles, which are two important concepts and tools in tail risk measurements, can be regarded as an extension of median and mean, respectively. Both of these tail risk measurers can actually be embedded in a common framework of $L_p$ optimization with the absolute loss function ($p=1$) and quadratic loss function ($p=2$), respectively. When 0-1 loss function is frequently used in statistics, machine learning and decision theory, this paper introduces an 0-1 loss function based $L_0$ optimisation problem for tail risk measure and names its solution as modile, which can be regarded as an extension of mode. Mode, as another measure of central tendency, is more robust than expectiles with outliers and easy to compute than quantiles. However, mode based extension for tail risk measure is new. This paper shows that the proposed modiles are not only more conservative than quantiles and expectiles for skewed and heavy-tailed distributions, but also providing or including the unique interpretation of these measures. Further, the modiles can be regarded as a type of generalized quantiles and doubly truncated tail measure whcih have recently attracted a lot of attention in the literature. The asymptotic properties of the corresponding sample-based estimators of modiles are provided, which, together with numerical analysis results, show that the proposed modiles are promising for tail measurement.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have found widespread applications in interpreting remote sensing (RS) imagery. However, it has been demonstrated in previous works that DNNs are vulnerable to different types of noises, particularly adversarial noises. Surprisingly, there has been a lack of comprehensive studies on the robustness of RS tasks, prompting us to undertake a thorough survey and benchmark on the robustness of image classification and object detection in RS. To our best knowledge, this study represents the first comprehensive examination of both natural robustness and adversarial robustness in RS tasks. Specifically, we have curated and made publicly available datasets that contain natural and adversarial noises. These datasets serve as valuable resources for evaluating the robustness of DNNs-based models. To provide a comprehensive assessment of model robustness, we conducted meticulous experiments with numerous different classifiers and detectors, encompassing a wide range of mainstream methods. Through rigorous evaluation, we have uncovered insightful and intriguing findings, which shed light on the relationship between adversarial noise crafting and model training, yielding a deeper understanding of the susceptibility and limitations of various models, and providing guidance for the development of more resilient and robust models
We propose an efficient abnormal event detection model based on a lightweight masked auto-encoder (AE) applied at the video frame level. The novelty of the proposed model is threefold. First, we introduce an approach to weight tokens based on motion gradients, thus avoiding learning to reconstruct the static background scene. Second, we integrate a teacher decoder and a student decoder into our architecture, leveraging the discrepancy between the outputs given by the two decoders to improve anomaly detection. Third, we generate synthetic abnormal events to augment the training videos, and task the masked AE model to jointly reconstruct the original frames (without anomalies) and the corresponding pixel-level anomaly maps. Our design leads to an efficient and effective model, as demonstrated by the extensive experiments carried out on three benchmarks: Avenue, ShanghaiTech and UCSD Ped2. The empirical results show that our model achieves an excellent trade-off between speed and accuracy, obtaining competitive AUC scores, while processing 1670 FPS. Hence, our model is between 8 and 70 times faster than competing methods. We also conduct an ablation study to justify our design.
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising paradigm that presents self-generated supervisory signals to real-world problems, bypassing the extensive manual labeling burden. SSL is especially attractive for unsupervised tasks such as anomaly detection, where labeled anomalies are often nonexistent and costly to obtain. While self-supervised anomaly detection (SSAD) has seen a recent surge of interest, the literature has failed to treat data augmentation as a hyperparameter. Meanwhile, recent works have reported that the choice of augmentation has significant impact on detection performance. In this paper, we introduce ST-SSAD (Self-Tuning Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection), the first systematic approach to SSAD in regards to rigorously tuning augmentation. To this end, our work presents two key contributions. The first is a new unsupervised validation loss that quantifies the alignment between the augmented training data and the (unlabeled) test data. In principle we adopt transduction, quantifying the extent to which augmentation mimics the true anomaly-generating mechanism, in contrast to augmenting data with arbitrary pseudo anomalies without regard to test data. Second, we present new differentiable augmentation functions, allowing data augmentation hyperparameter(s) to be tuned end-to-end via our proposed validation loss. Experiments on two testbeds with semantic class anomalies and subtle industrial defects show that systematically tuning augmentation offers significant performance gains over current practices.
Anomaly detection (AD) is a fundamental research problem in machine learning and computer vision, with practical applications in industrial inspection, video surveillance, and medical diagnosis. In medical imaging, AD is especially vital for detecting and diagnosing anomalies that may indicate rare diseases or conditions. However, there is a lack of a universal and fair benchmark for evaluating AD methods on medical images, which hinders the development of more generalized and robust AD methods in this specific domain. To bridge this gap, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation benchmark for assessing anomaly detection methods on medical images. This benchmark encompasses six reorganized datasets from five medical domains (i.e. brain MRI, liver CT, retinal OCT, chest X-ray, and digital histopathology) and three key evaluation metrics, and includes a total of fourteen state-of-the-art AD algorithms. This standardized and well-curated medical benchmark with the well-structured codebase enables comprehensive comparisons among recently proposed anomaly detection methods. It will facilitate the community to conduct a fair comparison and advance the field of AD on medical imaging. More information on BMAD is available in our GitHub repository: //github.com/DorisBao/BMAD
A community reveals the features and connections of its members that are different from those in other communities in a network. Detecting communities is of great significance in network analysis. Despite the classical spectral clustering and statistical inference methods, we notice a significant development of deep learning techniques for community detection in recent years with their advantages in handling high dimensional network data. Hence, a comprehensive overview of community detection's latest progress through deep learning is timely to both academics and practitioners. This survey devises and proposes a new taxonomy covering different categories of the state-of-the-art methods, including deep learning-based models upon deep neural networks, deep nonnegative matrix factorization and deep sparse filtering. The main category, i.e., deep neural networks, is further divided into convolutional networks, graph attention networks, generative adversarial networks and autoencoders. The survey also summarizes the popular benchmark data sets, model evaluation metrics, and open-source implementations to address experimentation settings. We then discuss the practical applications of community detection in various domains and point to implementation scenarios. Finally, we outline future directions by suggesting challenging topics in this fast-growing deep learning field.
The concept of smart grid has been introduced as a new vision of the conventional power grid to figure out an efficient way of integrating green and renewable energy technologies. In this way, Internet-connected smart grid, also called energy Internet, is also emerging as an innovative approach to ensure the energy from anywhere at any time. The ultimate goal of these developments is to build a sustainable society. However, integrating and coordinating a large number of growing connections can be a challenging issue for the traditional centralized grid system. Consequently, the smart grid is undergoing a transformation to the decentralized topology from its centralized form. On the other hand, blockchain has some excellent features which make it a promising application for smart grid paradigm. In this paper, we have an aim to provide a comprehensive survey on application of blockchain in smart grid. As such, we identify the significant security challenges of smart grid scenarios that can be addressed by blockchain. Then, we present a number of blockchain-based recent research works presented in different literatures addressing security issues in the area of smart grid. We also summarize several related practical projects, trials, and products that have been emerged recently. Finally, we discuss essential research challenges and future directions of applying blockchain to smart grid security issues.
It is important to detect anomalous inputs when deploying machine learning systems. The use of larger and more complex inputs in deep learning magnifies the difficulty of distinguishing between anomalous and in-distribution examples. At the same time, diverse image and text data are available in enormous quantities. We propose leveraging these data to improve deep anomaly detection by training anomaly detectors against an auxiliary dataset of outliers, an approach we call Outlier Exposure (OE). This enables anomaly detectors to generalize and detect unseen anomalies. In extensive experiments on natural language processing and small- and large-scale vision tasks, we find that Outlier Exposure significantly improves detection performance. We also observe that cutting-edge generative models trained on CIFAR-10 may assign higher likelihoods to SVHN images than to CIFAR-10 images; we use OE to mitigate this issue. We also analyze the flexibility and robustness of Outlier Exposure, and identify characteristics of the auxiliary dataset that improve performance.
In recent years, DBpedia, Freebase, OpenCyc, Wikidata, and YAGO have been published as noteworthy large, cross-domain, and freely available knowledge graphs. Although extensively in use, these knowledge graphs are hard to compare against each other in a given setting. Thus, it is a challenge for researchers and developers to pick the best knowledge graph for their individual needs. In our recent survey, we devised and applied data quality criteria to the above-mentioned knowledge graphs. Furthermore, we proposed a framework for finding the most suitable knowledge graph for a given setting. With this paper we intend to ease the access to our in-depth survey by presenting simplified rules that map individual data quality requirements to specific knowledge graphs. However, this paper does not intend to replace our previously introduced decision-support framework. For an informed decision on which KG is best for you we still refer to our in-depth survey.