Notwithstanding offering convenience and entertainment to society, Deepfake face swapping has caused critical privacy issues with the rapid development of deep generative models. Due to imperceptible artifacts in high-quality synthetic images, passive detection models against face swapping in recent years usually suffer performance damping regarding the generalizability issue. Therefore, several studies have been attempted to proactively protect the original images against malicious manipulations by inserting invisible signals in advance. However, the existing proactive defense approaches demonstrate unsatisfactory results with respect to visual quality, detection accuracy, and source tracing ability. In this study, to fulfill the research gap, we propose the first robust identity perceptual watermarking framework that concurrently performs detection and source tracing against Deepfake face swapping proactively. We assign identity semantics regarding the image contents to the watermarks and devise an unpredictable and nonreversible chaotic encryption system to ensure watermark confidentiality. The watermarks are encoded and recovered by jointly training an encoder-decoder framework along with adversarial image manipulations. Falsification and source tracing are accomplished by justifying the consistency between the content-matched identity perceptual watermark and the recovered robust watermark from the image. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art detection performance on Deepfake face swapping under both cross-dataset and cross-manipulation settings.
Although state-of-the-art classifiers for facial expression recognition (FER) can achieve a high level of accuracy, they lack interpretability, an important feature for end-users. Experts typically associate spatial action units (\aus) from a codebook to facial regions for the visual interpretation of expressions. In this paper, the same expert steps are followed. A new learning strategy is proposed to explicitly incorporate \au cues into classifier training, allowing to train deep interpretable models. During training, this \au codebook is used, along with the input image expression label, and facial landmarks, to construct a \au heatmap that indicates the most discriminative image regions of interest w.r.t the facial expression. This valuable spatial cue is leveraged to train a deep interpretable classifier for FER. This is achieved by constraining the spatial layer features of a classifier to be correlated with \au heatmaps. Using a composite loss, the classifier is trained to correctly classify an image while yielding interpretable visual layer-wise attention correlated with \au maps, simulating the expert decision process. Our strategy only relies on image class expression for supervision, without additional manual annotations. Our new strategy is generic, and can be applied to any deep CNN- or transformer-based classifier without requiring any architectural change or significant additional training time. Our extensive evaluation on two public benchmarks \rafdb, and \affectnet datasets shows that our proposed strategy can improve layer-wise interpretability without degrading classification performance. In addition, we explore a common type of interpretable classifiers that rely on class activation mapping (CAM) methods, and show that our approach can also improve CAM interpretability.
We investigate the role of the initial screening order (ISO) in candidate screening processes, such as employee hiring and academic admissions. The ISO refers to the order in which the screener evaluates the candidate pool. It has been largely overlooked in the literature, despite its potential impact on the optimality and fairness of the chosen set, especially under a human screener. We define two problem formulations: the best-$k$, where the screener selects the $k$ best candidates, and the good-$k$, where the screener selects the $k$ first good-enough candidates. To study the impact of the ISO, we introduce a human-like screener and compare it to its algorithmic counterpart. The human-like screener is conceived to be inconsistent over time due to fatigue. Our analysis shows that the ISO, in particular, under a human-like screener hinders individual fairness despite meeting group level fairness. This is due to the position bias, where a candidate's evaluation is affected by its position within the ISO. We report extensive simulated experiments exploring the parameters of the best-$k$ and good-$k$ problem formulations both for the algorithmic and human-like screeners. This work is motivated by a real world candidate screening problem studied in collaboration with a large European company.
Localization of computations plays a crucial role in solving hard problems efficiently. We will refer to the techniques implementing such localization as ${\mathit local}$ ${\mathit computing}$. We relate local computing with $\mathit{partial}$ $\mathit{quantifier}$ $\mathit{elimination}$ (PQE). The latter is a generalization of regular quantifier elimination where one can take a $\mathit{part}$ of the formula out of the scope of quantifiers. The objective of this paper is to show that PQE can be viewed as a language of local computing and hence building efficient PQE solvers is of great importance. We describe application of local computing by PQE to three different problems of hardware verification: property generation, equivalence checking and model checking. Besides, we discuss using local computing by PQE for SAT solving. Finally, we relate PQE and interpolation, a form of local computing.
Automated industries lead to high quality production, lower manufacturing cost and better utilization of human resources. Robotic manipulator arms have major role in the automation process. However, for complex manipulation tasks, hard coding efficient and safe trajectories is challenging and time consuming. Machine learning methods have the potential to learn such controllers based on expert demonstrations. Despite promising advances, better approaches must be developed to improve safety, reliability, and efficiency of ML methods in both training and deployment phases. This survey aims to review cutting edge technologies and recent trends on ML methods applied to real-world manipulation tasks. After reviewing the related background on ML, the rest of the paper is devoted to ML applications in different domains such as industry, healthcare, agriculture, space, military, and search and rescue. The paper is closed with important research directions for future works.
This paper shows that masked autoencoders (MAE) are scalable self-supervised learners for computer vision. Our MAE approach is simple: we mask random patches of the input image and reconstruct the missing pixels. It is based on two core designs. First, we develop an asymmetric encoder-decoder architecture, with an encoder that operates only on the visible subset of patches (without mask tokens), along with a lightweight decoder that reconstructs the original image from the latent representation and mask tokens. Second, we find that masking a high proportion of the input image, e.g., 75%, yields a nontrivial and meaningful self-supervisory task. Coupling these two designs enables us to train large models efficiently and effectively: we accelerate training (by 3x or more) and improve accuracy. Our scalable approach allows for learning high-capacity models that generalize well: e.g., a vanilla ViT-Huge model achieves the best accuracy (87.8%) among methods that use only ImageNet-1K data. Transfer performance in downstream tasks outperforms supervised pre-training and shows promising scaling behavior.
Recently, a considerable literature has grown up around the theme of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). How to effectively leverage the rich structural information in complex graphs, such as knowledge graphs with heterogeneous types of entities and relations, is a primary open challenge in the field. Most GCN methods are either restricted to graphs with a homogeneous type of edges (e.g., citation links only), or focusing on representation learning for nodes only instead of jointly propagating and updating the embeddings of both nodes and edges for target-driven objectives. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a novel framework, namely the Knowledge Embedding based Graph Convolutional Network (KE-GCN), which combines the power of GCNs in graph-based belief propagation and the strengths of advanced knowledge embedding (a.k.a. knowledge graph embedding) methods, and goes beyond. Our theoretical analysis shows that KE-GCN offers an elegant unification of several well-known GCN methods as specific cases, with a new perspective of graph convolution. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show the advantageous performance of KE-GCN over strong baseline methods in the tasks of knowledge graph alignment and entity classification.
Humans have a natural instinct to identify unknown object instances in their environments. The intrinsic curiosity about these unknown instances aids in learning about them, when the corresponding knowledge is eventually available. This motivates us to propose a novel computer vision problem called: `Open World Object Detection', where a model is tasked to: 1) identify objects that have not been introduced to it as `unknown', without explicit supervision to do so, and 2) incrementally learn these identified unknown categories without forgetting previously learned classes, when the corresponding labels are progressively received. We formulate the problem, introduce a strong evaluation protocol and provide a novel solution, which we call ORE: Open World Object Detector, based on contrastive clustering and energy based unknown identification. Our experimental evaluation and ablation studies analyze the efficacy of ORE in achieving Open World objectives. As an interesting by-product, we find that identifying and characterizing unknown instances helps to reduce confusion in an incremental object detection setting, where we achieve state-of-the-art performance, with no extra methodological effort. We hope that our work will attract further research into this newly identified, yet crucial research direction.
This paper addresses the difficulty of forecasting multiple financial time series (TS) conjointly using deep neural networks (DNN). We investigate whether DNN-based models could forecast these TS more efficiently by learning their representation directly. To this end, we make use of the dynamic factor graph (DFG) from that we enhance by proposing a novel variable-length attention-based mechanism to render it memory-augmented. Using this mechanism, we propose an unsupervised DNN architecture for multivariate TS forecasting that allows to learn and take advantage of the relationships between these TS. We test our model on two datasets covering 19 years of investment funds activities. Our experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms significantly typical DNN-based and statistical models at forecasting their 21-day price trajectory.
Link prediction for knowledge graphs is the task of predicting missing relationships between entities. Previous work on link prediction has focused on shallow, fast models which can scale to large knowledge graphs. However, these models learn less expressive features than deep, multi-layer models -- which potentially limits performance. In this work, we introduce ConvE, a multi-layer convolutional network model for link prediction, and report state-of-the-art results for several established datasets. We also show that the model is highly parameter efficient, yielding the same performance as DistMult and R-GCN with 8x and 17x fewer parameters. Analysis of our model suggests that it is particularly effective at modelling nodes with high indegree -- which are common in highly-connected, complex knowledge graphs such as Freebase and YAGO3. In addition, it has been noted that the WN18 and FB15k datasets suffer from test set leakage, due to inverse relations from the training set being present in the test set -- however, the extent of this issue has so far not been quantified. We find this problem to be severe: a simple rule-based model can achieve state-of-the-art results on both WN18 and FB15k. To ensure that models are evaluated on datasets where simply exploiting inverse relations cannot yield competitive results, we investigate and validate several commonly used datasets -- deriving robust variants where necessary. We then perform experiments on these robust datasets for our own and several previously proposed models, and find that ConvE achieves state-of-the-art Mean Reciprocal Rank across all datasets.
This paper proposes a method to modify traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) into interpretable CNNs, in order to clarify knowledge representations in high conv-layers of CNNs. In an interpretable CNN, each filter in a high conv-layer represents a certain object part. We do not need any annotations of object parts or textures to supervise the learning process. Instead, the interpretable CNN automatically assigns each filter in a high conv-layer with an object part during the learning process. Our method can be applied to different types of CNNs with different structures. The clear knowledge representation in an interpretable CNN can help people understand the logics inside a CNN, i.e., based on which patterns the CNN makes the decision. Experiments showed that filters in an interpretable CNN were more semantically meaningful than those in traditional CNNs.