Vision-language models are growing in popularity and public visibility to generate, edit, and caption images at scale; but their outputs can perpetuate and amplify societal biases learned during pre-training on uncurated image-text pairs from the internet. Although debiasing methods have been proposed, we argue that these measurements of model bias lack validity due to dataset bias. We demonstrate there are spurious correlations in COCO Captions, the most commonly used dataset for evaluating bias, between background context and the gender of people in-situ. This is problematic because commonly-used bias metrics (such as Bias@K) rely on per-gender base rates. To address this issue, we propose a novel dataset debiasing pipeline to augment the COCO dataset with synthetic, gender-balanced contrast sets, where only the gender of the subject is edited and the background is fixed. However, existing image editing methods have limitations and sometimes produce low-quality images; so, we introduce a method to automatically filter the generated images based on their similarity to real images. Using our balanced synthetic contrast sets, we benchmark bias in multiple CLIP-based models, demonstrating how metrics are skewed by imbalance in the original COCO images. Our results indicate that the proposed approach improves the validity of the evaluation, ultimately contributing to more realistic understanding of bias in vision-language models.
Bayesian model comparison (BMC) offers a principled approach for assessing the relative merits of competing computational models and propagating uncertainty into model selection decisions. However, BMC is often intractable for the popular class of hierarchical models due to their high-dimensional nested parameter structure. To address this intractability, we propose a deep learning method for performing BMC on any set of hierarchical models which can be instantiated as probabilistic programs. Since our method enables amortized inference, it allows efficient re-estimation of posterior model probabilities and fast performance validation prior to any real-data application. In a series of extensive validation studies, we benchmark the performance of our method against the state-of-the-art bridge sampling method and demonstrate excellent amortized inference across all BMC settings. We then showcase our method by comparing four hierarchical evidence accumulation models that have previously been deemed intractable for BMC due to partly implicit likelihoods. In this application, we corroborate evidence for the recently proposed L\'evy flight model of decision-making and show how transfer learning can be leveraged to enhance training efficiency. We provide reproducible code for all analyses and an open-source implementation of our method.
Human Activity Recognition (HAR), based on machine and deep learning algorithms is considered one of the most promising technologies to monitor professional and daily life activities for different categories of people (e.g., athletes, elderly, kids, employers) in order to provide a variety of services related, for example to well-being, empowering of technical performances, prevention of risky situation, and educational purposes. However, the analysis of the effectiveness and the efficiency of HAR methodologies suffers from the lack of a standard workflow, which might represent the baseline for the estimation of the quality of the developed pattern recognition models. This makes the comparison among different approaches a challenging task. In addition, researchers can make mistakes that, when not detected, definitely affect the achieved results. To mitigate such issues, this paper proposes an open-source automatic and highly configurable framework, named B-HAR, for the definition, standardization, and development of a baseline framework in order to evaluate and compare HAR methodologies. It implements the most popular data processing methods for data preparation and the most commonly used machine and deep learning pattern recognition models.
This paper proposes a data-efficient detection method for deep neural networks against backdoor attacks under a black-box scenario. The proposed approach is motivated by the intuition that features corresponding to triggers have a higher influence in determining the backdoored network output than any other benign features. To quantitatively measure the effects of triggers and benign features on determining the backdoored network output, we introduce five metrics. To calculate the five-metric values for a given input, we first generate several synthetic samples by injecting the input's partial contents into clean validation samples. Then, the five metrics are computed by using the output labels of the corresponding synthetic samples. One contribution of this work is the use of a tiny clean validation dataset. Having the computed five metrics, five novelty detectors are trained from the validation dataset. A meta novelty detector fuses the output of the five trained novelty detectors to generate a meta confidence score. During online testing, our method determines if online samples are poisoned or not via assessing their meta confidence scores output by the meta novelty detector. We show the efficacy of our methodology through a broad range of backdoor attacks, including ablation studies and comparison to existing approaches. Our methodology is promising since the proposed five metrics quantify the inherent differences between clean and poisoned samples. Additionally, our detection method can be incrementally improved by appending more metrics that may be proposed to address future advanced attacks.
Federated learning has become a popular method to learn from decentralized heterogeneous data. Federated semi-supervised learning (FSSL) emerges to train models from a small fraction of labeled data due to label scarcity on decentralized clients. Existing FSSL methods assume independent and identically distributed (IID) labeled data across clients and consistent class distribution between labeled and unlabeled data within a client. This work studies a more practical and challenging scenario of FSSL, where data distribution is different not only across clients but also within a client between labeled and unlabeled data. To address this challenge, we propose a novel FSSL framework with dual regulators, FedDure.} FedDure lifts the previous assumption with a coarse-grained regulator (C-reg) and a fine-grained regulator (F-reg): C-reg regularizes the updating of the local model by tracking the learning effect on labeled data distribution; F-reg learns an adaptive weighting scheme tailored for unlabeled instances in each client. We further formulate the client model training as bi-level optimization that adaptively optimizes the model in the client with two regulators. Theoretically, we show the convergence guarantee of the dual regulators. Empirically, we demonstrate that FedDure is superior to the existing methods across a wide range of settings, notably by more than 11% on CIFAR-10 and CINIC-10 datasets.
The optimal prediction strategy for out-of-distribution (OOD) setups is a fundamental question in machine learning. In this paper, we address this question and present several contributions. We propose three reject option models for OOD setups: the Cost-based model, the Bounded TPR-FPR model, and the Bounded Precision-Recall model. These models extend the standard reject option models used in non-OOD setups and define the notion of an optimal OOD selective classifier. We establish that all the proposed models, despite their different formulations, share a common class of optimal strategies. Motivated by the optimal strategy, we introduce double-score OOD methods that leverage uncertainty scores from two chosen OOD detectors: one focused on OOD/ID discrimination and the other on misclassification detection. The experimental results consistently demonstrate the superior performance of this simple strategy compared to state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we propose novel evaluation metrics derived from the definition of the optimal strategy under the proposed OOD rejection models. These new metrics provide a comprehensive and reliable assessment of OOD methods without the deficiencies observed in existing evaluation approaches.
The fast spread of hate speech on social media impacts the Internet environment and our society by increasing prejudice and hurting people. Detecting hate speech has aroused broad attention in the field of natural language processing. Although hate speech detection has been addressed in recent work, this task still faces two inherent unsolved challenges. The first challenge lies in the complex semantic information conveyed in hate speech, particularly the interference of insulting words in hate speech detection. The second challenge is the imbalanced distribution of hate speech and non-hate speech, which may significantly deteriorate the performance of models. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel dual contrastive learning (DCL) framework for hate speech detection. Our framework jointly optimizes the self-supervised and the supervised contrastive learning loss for capturing span-level information beyond the token-level emotional semantics used in existing models, particularly detecting speech containing abusive and insulting words. Moreover, we integrate the focal loss into the dual contrastive learning framework to alleviate the problem of data imbalance. We conduct experiments on two publicly available English datasets, and experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models and precisely detects hate speeches.
Deep learning models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in learning complex patterns and concepts from training data. However, recent findings indicate that these models tend to rely heavily on simple and easily discernible features present in the background of images rather than the main concepts or objects they are intended to classify. This phenomenon poses a challenge to image classifiers as the crucial elements of interest in images may be overshadowed. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address this issue and improve the learning of main concepts by image classifiers. Our central idea revolves around concurrently guiding the model's attention toward the foreground during the classification task. By emphasizing the foreground, which encapsulates the primary objects of interest, we aim to shift the focus of the model away from the dominant influence of the background. To accomplish this, we introduce a mechanism that encourages the model to allocate sufficient attention to the foreground. We investigate various strategies, including modifying the loss function or incorporating additional architectural components, to enable the classifier to effectively capture the primary concept within an image. Additionally, we explore the impact of different foreground attention mechanisms on model performance and provide insights into their effectiveness. Through extensive experimentation on benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach in improving the classification accuracy of image classifiers. Our findings highlight the importance of foreground attention in enhancing model understanding and representation of the main concepts within images. The results of this study contribute to advancing the field of image classification and provide valuable insights for developing more robust and accurate deep-learning models.
Detection and recognition of text in natural images are two main problems in the field of computer vision that have a wide variety of applications in analysis of sports videos, autonomous driving, industrial automation, to name a few. They face common challenging problems that are factors in how text is represented and affected by several environmental conditions. The current state-of-the-art scene text detection and/or recognition methods have exploited the witnessed advancement in deep learning architectures and reported a superior accuracy on benchmark datasets when tackling multi-resolution and multi-oriented text. However, there are still several remaining challenges affecting text in the wild images that cause existing methods to underperform due to there models are not able to generalize to unseen data and the insufficient labeled data. Thus, unlike previous surveys in this field, the objectives of this survey are as follows: first, offering the reader not only a review on the recent advancement in scene text detection and recognition, but also presenting the results of conducting extensive experiments using a unified evaluation framework that assesses pre-trained models of the selected methods on challenging cases, and applies the same evaluation criteria on these techniques. Second, identifying several existing challenges for detecting or recognizing text in the wild images, namely, in-plane-rotation, multi-oriented and multi-resolution text, perspective distortion, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex fonts, and special characters. Finally, the paper also presents insight into the potential research directions in this field to address some of the mentioned challenges that are still encountering scene text detection and recognition techniques.
Deep neural network architectures have traditionally been designed and explored with human expertise in a long-lasting trial-and-error process. This process requires huge amount of time, expertise, and resources. To address this tedious problem, we propose a novel algorithm to optimally find hyperparameters of a deep network architecture automatically. We specifically focus on designing neural architectures for medical image segmentation task. Our proposed method is based on a policy gradient reinforcement learning for which the reward function is assigned a segmentation evaluation utility (i.e., dice index). We show the efficacy of the proposed method with its low computational cost in comparison with the state-of-the-art medical image segmentation networks. We also present a new architecture design, a densely connected encoder-decoder CNN, as a strong baseline architecture to apply the proposed hyperparameter search algorithm. We apply the proposed algorithm to each layer of the baseline architectures. As an application, we train the proposed system on cine cardiac MR images from Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) MICCAI 2017. Starting from a baseline segmentation architecture, the resulting network architecture obtains the state-of-the-art results in accuracy without performing any trial-and-error based architecture design approaches or close supervision of the hyperparameters changes.
Image captioning is a challenging task that combines the field of computer vision and natural language processing. A variety of approaches have been proposed to achieve the goal of automatically describing an image, and recurrent neural network (RNN) or long-short term memory (LSTM) based models dominate this field. However, RNNs or LSTMs cannot be calculated in parallel and ignore the underlying hierarchical structure of a sentence. In this paper, we propose a framework that only employs convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to generate captions. Owing to parallel computing, our basic model is around 3 times faster than NIC (an LSTM-based model) during training time, while also providing better results. We conduct extensive experiments on MSCOCO and investigate the influence of the model width and depth. Compared with LSTM-based models that apply similar attention mechanisms, our proposed models achieves comparable scores of BLEU-1,2,3,4 and METEOR, and higher scores of CIDEr. We also test our model on the paragraph annotation dataset, and get higher CIDEr score compared with hierarchical LSTMs