Perception algorithms in autonomous vehicles are vital for the vehicle to understand the semantics of its surroundings, including detection and tracking of objects in the environment. The outputs of these algorithms are in turn used for decision-making in safety-critical scenarios like collision avoidance, and automated emergency braking. Thus, it is crucial to monitor such perception systems at runtime. However, due to the high-level, complex representations of the outputs of perception systems, it is a challenge to test and verify these systems, especially at runtime. In this paper, we present a runtime monitoring tool, PerceMon that can monitor arbitrary specifications in Timed Quality Temporal Logic (TQTL) and its extensions with spatial operators. We integrate the tool with the CARLA autonomous vehicle simulation environment and the ROS middleware platform while monitoring properties on state-of-the-art object detection and tracking algorithms.
Robust change-point detection for large-scale data streams has many real-world applications in industrial quality control, signal detection, biosurveillance. Unfortunately, it is highly non-trivial to develop efficient schemes due to three challenges: (1) the unknown sparse subset of affected data streams, (2) the unexpected outliers, and (3) computational scalability for real-time monitoring and detection. In this article, we develop a family of efficient real-time robust detection schemes for monitoring large-scale independent data streams. For each data stream, we propose to construct a new local robust detection statistic called $L_{\alpha}$-CUSUM statistic that can reduce the effect of outliers by using the Box-Cox transformation of the likelihood function. Then the global scheme will raise an alarm based upon the sum of the shrinkage transformation of these local $L_{\alpha}$-CUSUM statistics so as to filter out unaffected data streams. In addition, we propose a new concept called {\em false alarm breakdown point} to measure the robustness of online monitoring schemes and propose a worst-case detection efficiency score to measure the detection efficiency when the data contain outliers. We then characterize the breakdown point and the efficiency score of our proposed schemes. Asymptotic analysis and numerical simulations are conducted to illustrate the robustness and efficiency of our proposed schemes.
Modern epidemiological analyses to understand and combat the spread of disease depend critically on access to, and use of, data. Rapidly evolving data, such as data streams changing during a disease outbreak, are particularly challenging. Data management is further complicated by data being imprecisely identified when used. Public trust in policy decisions resulting from such analyses is easily damaged and is often low, with cynicism arising where claims of "following the science" are made without accompanying evidence. Tracing the provenance of such decisions back through open software to primary data would clarify this evidence, enhancing the transparency of the decision-making process. Here, we demonstrate a Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data pipeline developed during the COVID-19 pandemic that allows easy annotation of data as they are consumed by analyses, while tracing the provenance of scientific outputs back through the analytical source code to data sources. Such a tool provides a mechanism for the public, and fellow scientists, to better assess the trust that should be placed in scientific evidence, while allowing scientists to support policy-makers in openly justifying their decisions. We believe that tools such as this should be promoted for use across all areas of policy-facing research.
Zero/few-shot transfer to unseen services is a critical challenge in task-oriented dialogue research. The Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset introduced a paradigm for enabling models to support an unlimited number of services without additional data collection or re-training through the use of schemas. Schemas describe service APIs in natural language, which models consume to understand the services they need to support. However, the impact of the choice of language in these schemas on model performance remains unexplored. We address this by releasing SGD-X, a benchmark for measuring the robustness of dialogue systems to linguistic variations in schemas. SGD-X extends the SGD dataset with crowdsourced variants for every schema, where variants are semantically similar yet stylistically diverse. We evaluate two dialogue state tracking models on SGD-X and observe that neither generalizes well across schema variations, measured by joint goal accuracy and a novel metric for measuring schema sensitivity. Furthermore, we present a simple model-agnostic data augmentation method to improve schema robustness and zero-shot generalization to unseen services.
Modern software systems become too complex to be tested and validated. Detecting software partial failures in complex systems at runtime assist to handle software unintended behaviors, avoiding catastrophic software failures and improving software runtime availability. These detection techniques aim to find the manifestation of faults before they finally lead to unavoidable failures, thus supporting following runtime fault tolerant techniques. We review the state of the art articles and find that the content failures account for the majority of all kinds of software failures, but its detection methods are rarely studied. In this work, we propose a novel failure detection indicator based on the software runtime dynamic execution information for software content failures. The runtime information is recorded during software execution, then transformed to a measure named runtime entropy and finally fed into machine learning models. The machine learning models are built to classify the intended and unintended behaviors of the objected software systems. A series of controlled experiments on several open source projects are conducted to prove the feasibility of the method. We also evaluate the accuracy of machine learning models built in this work.
We introduce DeepPSL a variant of Probabilistic Soft Logic (PSL) to produce an end-to-end trainable system that integrates reasoning and perception. PSL represents first-order logic in terms of a convex graphical model -- Hinge Loss Markov random fields (HL-MRFs). PSL stands out among probabilistic logic frameworks due to its tractability having been applied to systems of more than 1 billion ground rules. The key to our approach is to represent predicates in first-order logic using deep neural networks and then to approximately back-propagate through the HL-MRF and thus train every aspect of the first-order system being represented. We believe that this approach represents an interesting direction for the integration of deep learning and reasoning techniques with applications to knowledge base learning, multi-task learning, and explainability. We evaluate DeepPSL on a zero shot learning problem in image classification. State of the art results demonstrate the utility and flexibility of our approach.
Communication connectivity is desirable for safe and efficient operation of multi-robot systems. While decentralized algorithms for connectivity maintenance have been explored in recent literature, the majority of these works do not account for robot motion and sensing uncertainties. These uncertainties are inherent in practical robots and result in robots deviating from their desired positions which could potentially result in a loss of connectivity. In this paper we present a Decentralized Connectivity Maintenance algorithm accounting for robot motion and sensing Uncertainties (DCMU). We first propose a novel weighted graph definition for the multi-robot system that accounts for the aforementioned uncertainties along with realistic connectivity constraints such as line-of-sight connectivity and collision avoidance. Next we design a decentralized gradient-based controller for connectivity maintenance where we derive the gradients of our weighted graph edge weights required for computing the control. Finally, we perform multiple simulations to validate the connectivity maintenance performance of our DCMU algorithm under robot motion and sensing uncertainties and show an improvement compared to previous work.
Deep learning has been successfully applied to solve various complex problems ranging from big data analytics to computer vision and human-level control. Deep learning advances however have also been employed to create software that can cause threats to privacy, democracy and national security. One of those deep learning-powered applications recently emerged is "deepfake". Deepfake algorithms can create fake images and videos that humans cannot distinguish them from authentic ones. The proposal of technologies that can automatically detect and assess the integrity of digital visual media is therefore indispensable. This paper presents a survey of algorithms used to create deepfakes and, more importantly, methods proposed to detect deepfakes in the literature to date. We present extensive discussions on challenges, research trends and directions related to deepfake technologies. By reviewing the background of deepfakes and state-of-the-art deepfake detection methods, this study provides a comprehensive overview of deepfake techniques and facilitates the development of new and more robust methods to deal with the increasingly challenging deepfakes.
Benefit from the quick development of deep learning techniques, salient object detection has achieved remarkable progresses recently. However, there still exists following two major challenges that hinder its application in embedded devices, low resolution output and heavy model weight. To this end, this paper presents an accurate yet compact deep network for efficient salient object detection. More specifically, given a coarse saliency prediction in the deepest layer, we first employ residual learning to learn side-output residual features for saliency refinement, which can be achieved with very limited convolutional parameters while keep accuracy. Secondly, we further propose reverse attention to guide such side-output residual learning in a top-down manner. By erasing the current predicted salient regions from side-output features, the network can eventually explore the missing object parts and details which results in high resolution and accuracy. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods, and with advantages in terms of simplicity, efficiency (45 FPS) and model size (81 MB).
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), have intrigued different people from all walks of life, because of their pervasive computing capabilities. UAV equipped with vision techniques, could be leveraged to establish navigation autonomous control for UAV itself. Also, object detection from UAV could be used to broaden the utilization of drone to provide ubiquitous surveillance and monitoring services towards military operation, urban administration and agriculture management. As the data-driven technologies evolved, machine learning algorithm, especially the deep learning approach has been intensively utilized to solve different traditional computer vision research problems. Modern Convolutional Neural Networks based object detectors could be divided into two major categories: one-stage object detector and two-stage object detector. In this study, we utilize some representative CNN based object detectors to execute the computer vision task over Stanford Drone Dataset (SDD). State-of-the-art performance has been achieved in utilizing focal loss dense detector RetinaNet based approach for object detection from UAV in a fast and accurate manner.
There is growing interest in object detection in advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous robots and vehicles. To enable such innovative systems, we need faster object detection. In this work, we investigate the trade-off between accuracy and speed with domain-specific approximations, i.e. category-aware image size scaling and proposals scaling, for two state-of-the-art deep learning-based object detection meta-architectures. We study the effectiveness of applying approximation both statically and dynamically to understand the potential and the applicability of them. By conducting experiments on the ImageNet VID dataset, we show that domain-specific approximation has great potential to improve the speed of the system without deteriorating the accuracy of object detectors, i.e. up to 7.5x speedup for dynamic domain-specific approximation. To this end, we present our insights toward harvesting domain-specific approximation as well as devise a proof-of-concept runtime, AutoFocus, that exploits dynamic domain-specific approximation.