Most speech self-supervised learning (SSL) models are trained with a pretext task which consists in predicting missing parts of the input signal, either future segments (causal prediction) or segments masked anywhere within the input (non-causal prediction). Learned speech representations can then be efficiently transferred to downstream tasks (e.g., automatic speech or speaker recognition). In the present study, we investigate the use of a speech SSL model for speech inpainting, that is reconstructing a missing portion of a speech signal from its surrounding context, i.e., fulfilling a downstream task that is very similar to the pretext task. To that purpose, we combine an SSL encoder, namely HuBERT, with a neural vocoder, namely HiFiGAN, playing the role of a decoder. In particular, we propose two solutions to match the HuBERT output with the HiFiGAN input, by freezing one and fine-tuning the other, and vice versa. Performance of both approaches was assessed in single- and multi-speaker settings, for both informed and blind inpainting configurations (i.e., the position of the mask is known or unknown, respectively), with different objective metrics and a perceptual evaluation. Performances show that if both solutions allow to correctly reconstruct signal portions up to the size of 200ms (and even 400ms in some cases), fine-tuning the SSL encoder provides a more accurate signal reconstruction in the single-speaker setting case, while freezing it (and training the neural vocoder instead) is a better strategy when dealing with multi-speaker data.
Spatiotemporal federated learning has recently raised intensive studies due to its ability to train valuable models with only shared gradients in various location-based services. On the other hand, recent studies have shown that shared gradients may be subject to gradient inversion attacks (GIA) on images or texts. However, so far there has not been any systematic study of the gradient inversion attacks in spatiotemporal federated learning. In this paper, we explore the gradient attack problem in spatiotemporal federated learning from attack and defense perspectives. To understand privacy risks in spatiotemporal federated learning, we first propose Spatiotemporal Gradient Inversion Attack (ST-GIA), a gradient attack algorithm tailored to spatiotemporal data that successfully reconstructs the original location from gradients. Furthermore, we design an adaptive defense strategy to mitigate gradient inversion attacks in spatiotemporal federated learning. By dynamically adjusting the perturbation levels, we can offer tailored protection for varying rounds of training data, thereby achieving a better trade-off between privacy and utility than current state-of-the-art methods. Through intensive experimental analysis on three real-world datasets, we reveal that the proposed defense strategy can well preserve the utility of spatiotemporal federated learning with effective security protection.
Vision-language pre-training (VLP) models exhibit remarkable capabilities in comprehending both images and text, yet they remain susceptible to multimodal adversarial examples (AEs).Strengthening attacks and uncovering vulnerabilities, especially common issues in VLP models (e.g., high transferable AEs), can advance reliable and practical VLP models. A recent work (i.e., Set-level guidance attack) indicates that augmenting image-text pairs to increase AE diversity along the optimization path enhances the transferability of adversarial examples significantly. However, this approach predominantly emphasizes diversity around the online adversarial examples (i.e., AEs in the optimization period), leading to the risk of overfitting the victim model and affecting the transferability.In this study, we posit that the diversity of adversarial examples towards the clean input and online AEs are both pivotal for enhancing transferability across VLP models. Consequently, we propose using diversification along the intersection region of adversarial trajectory to expand the diversity of AEs.To fully leverage the interaction between modalities, we introduce text-guided adversarial example selection during optimization. Furthermore, to further mitigate the potential overfitting, we direct the adversarial text deviating from the last intersection region along the optimization path, rather than adversarial images as in existing methods.Extensive experiments affirm the effectiveness of our method in improving transferability across various VLP models and downstream vision-and-language tasks.
Federated learning is one popular paradigm to train a joint model in a distributed, privacy-preserving environment. But partial annotations pose an obstacle meaning that categories of labels are heterogeneous over clients. We propose to learn a joint backbone in a federated manner, while each site receives its own multi-label segmentation head. By using Bayesian techniques we observe that the different segmentation heads although only trained on the individual client's labels also learn information about the other labels not present at the respective site. This information is encoded in their predictive uncertainty. To obtain a final prediction we leverage this uncertainty and perform a weighted averaging of the ensemble of distributed segmentation heads, which allows us to segment "locally unknown" structures. With our method, which we refer to as FUNAvg, we are even on-par with the models trained and tested on the same dataset on average. The code is publicly available at //github.com/Cardio-AI/FUNAvg.
In differentially private (DP) machine learning, the privacy guarantees of DP mechanisms are often reported and compared on the basis of a single $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-pair. This practice overlooks that DP guarantees can vary substantially even between mechanisms sharing a given $(\varepsilon, \delta)$, and potentially introduces privacy vulnerabilities which can remain undetected. This motivates the need for robust, rigorous methods for comparing DP guarantees in such cases. Here, we introduce the $\Delta$-divergence between mechanisms which quantifies the worst-case excess privacy vulnerability of choosing one mechanism over another in terms of $(\varepsilon, \delta)$, $f$-DP and in terms of a newly presented Bayesian interpretation. Moreover, as a generalisation of the Blackwell theorem, it is endowed with strong decision-theoretic foundations. Through application examples, we show that our techniques can facilitate informed decision-making and reveal gaps in the current understanding of privacy risks, as current practices in DP-SGD often result in choosing mechanisms with high excess privacy vulnerabilities.
In-situ sensing, in conjunction with learning models, presents a unique opportunity to address persistent defect issues in Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes. However, this integration introduces significant data privacy concerns, such as data leakage, sensor data compromise, and model inversion attacks, revealing critical details about part design, material composition, and machine parameters. Differential Privacy (DP) models, which inject noise into data under mathematical guarantees, offer a nuanced balance between data utility and privacy by obscuring traces of sensing data. However, the introduction of noise into learning models, often functioning as black boxes, complicates the prediction of how specific noise levels impact model accuracy. This study introduces the Differential Privacy-HyperDimensional computing (DP-HD) framework, leveraging the explainability of the vector symbolic paradigm to predict the noise impact on the accuracy of in-situ monitoring, safeguarding sensitive data while maintaining operational efficiency. Experimental results on real-world high-speed melt pool data of AM for detecting overhang anomalies demonstrate that DP-HD achieves superior operational efficiency, prediction accuracy, and robust privacy protection, outperforming state-of-the-art Machine Learning (ML) models. For example, when implementing the same level of privacy protection (with a privacy budget set at 1), our model achieved an accuracy of 94.43%, surpassing the performance of traditional models such as ResNet50 (52.30%), GoogLeNet (23.85%), AlexNet (55.78%), DenseNet201 (69.13%), and EfficientNet B2 (40.81%). Notably, DP-HD maintains high performance under substantial noise additions designed to enhance privacy, unlike current models that suffer significant accuracy declines under high privacy constraints.
Poisoning attacks compromise the training phase of federated learning (FL) such that the learned global model misclassifies attacker-chosen inputs called target inputs. Existing defenses mainly focus on protecting the training phase of FL such that the learnt global model is poison free. However, these defenses often achieve limited effectiveness when the clients' local training data is highly non-iid or the number of malicious clients is large, as confirmed in our experiments. In this work, we propose FLForensics, the first poison-forensics method for FL. FLForensics complements existing training-phase defenses. In particular, when training-phase defenses fail and a poisoned global model is deployed, FLForensics aims to trace back the malicious clients that performed the poisoning attack after a misclassified target input is identified. We theoretically show that FLForensics can accurately distinguish between benign and malicious clients under a formal definition of poisoning attack. Moreover, we empirically show the effectiveness of FLForensics at tracing back both existing and adaptive poisoning attacks on five benchmark datasets.
Speech encoders pretrained through self-supervised learning (SSL) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various downstream tasks, including Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). For instance, fine-tuning SSL models for such tasks has shown significant potential, leading to improvements in the SOTA performance across challenging datasets. In contrast to existing research, this paper contributes by comparing the effectiveness of SSL approaches in the context of (i) the low-resource spoken Tunisian Arabic dialect and (ii) its combination with a low-resource SLU and ASR scenario, where only a few semantic annotations are available for fine-tuning. We conduct experiments using many SSL speech encoders on the TARIC-SLU dataset. We use speech encoders that were pre-trained on either monolingual or multilingual speech data. Some of them have also been refined without in-domain nor Tunisian data through multimodal supervised teacher-student paradigm. This study yields numerous significant findings that we are discussing in this paper.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) which are trained on large text corpus via self-supervised learning method, have yielded promising performance on various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, though PLMs with huge parameters can effectively possess rich knowledge learned from massive training text and benefit downstream tasks at the fine-tuning stage, they still have some limitations such as poor reasoning ability due to the lack of external knowledge. Research has been dedicated to incorporating knowledge into PLMs to tackle these issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KE-PLMs) to provide a clear insight into this thriving field. We introduce appropriate taxonomies respectively for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to highlight these two main tasks of NLP. For NLU, we divide the types of knowledge into four categories: linguistic knowledge, text knowledge, knowledge graph (KG), and rule knowledge. The KE-PLMs for NLG are categorized into KG-based and retrieval-based methods. Finally, we point out some promising future directions of KE-PLMs.
In contrast to batch learning where all training data is available at once, continual learning represents a family of methods that accumulate knowledge and learn continuously with data available in sequential order. Similar to the human learning process with the ability of learning, fusing, and accumulating new knowledge coming at different time steps, continual learning is considered to have high practical significance. Hence, continual learning has been studied in various artificial intelligence tasks. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the recent progress of continual learning in computer vision. In particular, the works are grouped by their representative techniques, including regularization, knowledge distillation, memory, generative replay, parameter isolation, and a combination of the above techniques. For each category of these techniques, both its characteristics and applications in computer vision are presented. At the end of this overview, several subareas, where continuous knowledge accumulation is potentially helpful while continual learning has not been well studied, are discussed.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.