Research on adversarial robustness is primarily focused on image and text data. Yet, many scenarios in which lack of robustness can result in serious risks, such as fraud detection, medical diagnosis, or recommender systems often do not rely on images or text but instead on tabular data. Adversarial robustness in tabular data poses two serious challenges. First, tabular datasets often contain categorical features, and therefore cannot be tackled directly with existing optimization procedures. Second, in the tabular domain, algorithms that are not based on deep networks are widely used and offer great performance, but algorithms to enhance robustness are tailored to neural networks (e.g. adversarial training). In this paper, we tackle both challenges. We present a method that allows us to train adversarially robust deep networks for tabular data and to transfer this robustness to other classifiers via universal robust embeddings tailored to categorical data. These embeddings, created using a bilevel alternating minimization framework, can be transferred to boosted trees or random forests making them robust without the need for adversarial training while preserving their high accuracy on tabular data. We show that our methods outperform existing techniques within a practical threat model suitable for tabular data.
Text summarization is the process of condensing a piece of text to fewer sentences, while still preserving its content. Chat transcript, in this context, is a textual copy of a digital or online conversation between a customer (caller) and agent(s). This paper presents an indigenously (locally) developed hybrid method that first combines extractive and abstractive summarization techniques in compressing ill-punctuated or un-punctuated chat transcripts to produce more readable punctuated summaries and then optimizes the overall quality of summarization through reinforcement learning. Extensive testing, evaluations, comparisons, and validation have demonstrated the efficacy of this approach for large-scale deployment of chat transcript summarization, in the absence of manually generated reference (annotated) summaries.
Modeling the correlations among errors is closely associated with how accurately the model can quantify predictive uncertainty in probabilistic time series forecasting. Recent multivariate models have made significant progress in accounting for contemporaneous correlations among errors, while a common assumption on these errors is that they are temporally independent for the sake of statistical simplicity. However, real-world observations often deviate from this assumption, since errors usually exhibit substantial autocorrelation due to various factors such as the exclusion of temporally correlated covariates. In this work, we propose an efficient method, based on a low-rank-plus-diagonal parameterization of the covariance matrix, which can effectively characterize the autocorrelation of errors. The proposed method possesses several desirable properties: the complexity does not scale with the number of time series, the resulting covariance can be used for calibrating predictions, and it can seamlessly integrate with any model with Gaussian-distributed errors. We empirically demonstrate these properties using two distinct neural forecasting models -- GPVar and Transformer. Our experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our method in enhancing predictive accuracy and the quality of uncertainty quantification on multiple real-world datasets.
Deep generative models have recently emerged as an effective approach to offline reinforcement learning. However, their large model size poses challenges in computation. We address this issue by proposing a knowledge distillation method based on data augmentation. In particular, high-return trajectories are generated from a conditional diffusion model, and they are blended with the original trajectories through a novel stitching algorithm that leverages a new reward generator. Applying the resulting dataset to behavioral cloning, the learned shallow policy whose size is much smaller outperforms or nearly matches deep generative planners on several D4RL benchmarks.
Efficient parallel computing has become a pivotal element in advancing artificial intelligence. Yet, the deployment of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) in this domain is hampered by their inherent sequential computational dependency. This constraint arises from the need for each time step's processing to rely on the preceding step's outcomes, significantly impeding the adaptability of SNN models to massively parallel computing environments. Addressing this challenge, our paper introduces the innovative Parallel Spiking Unit (PSU) and its two derivatives, the Input-aware PSU (IPSU) and Reset-aware PSU (RPSU). These variants skillfully decouple the leaky integration and firing mechanisms in spiking neurons while probabilistically managing the reset process. By preserving the fundamental computational attributes of the spiking neuron model, our approach enables the concurrent computation of all membrane potential instances within the SNN, facilitating parallel spike output generation and substantially enhancing computational efficiency. Comprehensive testing across various datasets, including static and sequential images, Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) data, and speech datasets, demonstrates that the PSU and its variants not only significantly boost performance and simulation speed but also augment the energy efficiency of SNNs through enhanced sparsity in neural activity. These advancements underscore the potential of our method in revolutionizing SNN deployment for high-performance parallel computing applications.
With the recent advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), generating functionally correct code has become less complicated for a wide array of developers. While using LLMs has sped up the functional development process, it poses a heavy risk to code security. Code generation with proper security measures using LLM is a significantly more challenging task than functional code generation. Security measures may include adding a pair of lines of code with the original code, consisting of null pointer checking or prepared statements for SQL injection prevention. Currently, available code repair LLMs generate code repair by supervised fine-tuning, where the model looks at cross-entropy loss. However, the original and repaired codes are mostly similar in functionality and syntactically, except for a few (1-2) lines, which act as security measures. This imbalance between the lines needed for security measures and the functional code enforces the supervised fine-tuned model to prioritize generating functional code without adding proper security measures, which also benefits the model by resulting in minimal loss. Therefore, in this work, for security hardening and strengthening of generated code from LLMs, we propose a reinforcement learning-based method for program-specific repair with the combination of semantic and syntactic reward mechanisms that focus heavily on adding security and functional measures in the code, respectively.
This study explores modeling and control for quadrotor acrobatics, focusing on executing flip maneuvers. Flips are an elegant way to deliver sensor probes into no-fly or hazardous zones, like volcanic vents. Successful flips require feasible trajectories and precise control, influenced by rotor dynamics, thrust allocation, and control methodologies. The research introduces a novel approach using Model Predictive Control (MPC) for real-time trajectory planning. The MPC considers dynamic constraints and environmental variables, ensuring system stability during maneuvers. The proposed methodology's effectiveness is examined through simulation studies in ROS and Gazebo, providing insights into quadrotor behavior, response time, and trajectory accuracy. Real-time flight experiments on a custom agile quadrotor using PixHawk 4 and Hardkernel Odroid validate MPC-designed controllers. Experiments confirm successful execution and adaptability to real-world scenarios. Outcomes contribute to autonomous aerial robotics, especially aerial acrobatics, enhancing mission capabilities. MPC controllers find applications in probe throws and optimal image capture views through efficient flight paths, e.g., full roll maneuvers. This research paves the way for quadrotors in demanding scenarios, showcasing groundbreaking applications. Video Link: \url{ //www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzR0PWjy9W4}
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used for document classification. However, most existing methods are based on static word co-occurrence graphs without sentence-level information, which poses three challenges:(1) word ambiguity, (2) word synonymity, and (3) dynamic contextual dependency. To address these challenges, we propose a novel GNN-based sparse structure learning model for inductive document classification. Specifically, a document-level graph is initially generated by a disjoint union of sentence-level word co-occurrence graphs. Our model collects a set of trainable edges connecting disjoint words between sentences and employs structure learning to sparsely select edges with dynamic contextual dependencies. Graphs with sparse structures can jointly exploit local and global contextual information in documents through GNNs. For inductive learning, the refined document graph is further fed into a general readout function for graph-level classification and optimization in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms most state-of-the-art results, and reveal the necessity to learn sparse structures for each document.
Data augmentation has been widely used to improve generalizability of machine learning models. However, comparatively little work studies data augmentation for graphs. This is largely due to the complex, non-Euclidean structure of graphs, which limits possible manipulation operations. Augmentation operations commonly used in vision and language have no analogs for graphs. Our work studies graph data augmentation for graph neural networks (GNNs) in the context of improving semi-supervised node-classification. We discuss practical and theoretical motivations, considerations and strategies for graph data augmentation. Our work shows that neural edge predictors can effectively encode class-homophilic structure to promote intra-class edges and demote inter-class edges in given graph structure, and our main contribution introduces the GAug graph data augmentation framework, which leverages these insights to improve performance in GNN-based node classification via edge prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that augmentation via GAug improves performance across GNN architectures and datasets.
Image segmentation is an important component of many image understanding systems. It aims to group pixels in a spatially and perceptually coherent manner. Typically, these algorithms have a collection of parameters that control the degree of over-segmentation produced. It still remains a challenge to properly select such parameters for human-like perceptual grouping. In this work, we exploit the diversity of segments produced by different choices of parameters. We scan the segmentation parameter space and generate a collection of image segmentation hypotheses (from highly over-segmented to under-segmented). These are fed into a cost minimization framework that produces the final segmentation by selecting segments that: (1) better describe the natural contours of the image, and (2) are more stable and persistent among all the segmentation hypotheses. We compare our algorithm's performance with state-of-the-art algorithms, showing that we can achieve improved results. We also show that our framework is robust to the choice of segmentation kernel that produces the initial set of hypotheses.
Image segmentation is considered to be one of the critical tasks in hyperspectral remote sensing image processing. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has established itself as a powerful model in segmentation and classification by demonstrating excellent performances. The use of a graphical model such as a conditional random field (CRF) contributes further in capturing contextual information and thus improving the segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a method to segment hyperspectral images by considering both spectral and spatial information via a combined framework consisting of CNN and CRF. We use multiple spectral cubes to learn deep features using CNN, and then formulate deep CRF with CNN-based unary and pairwise potential functions to effectively extract the semantic correlations between patches consisting of three-dimensional data cubes. Effective piecewise training is applied in order to avoid the computationally expensive iterative CRF inference. Furthermore, we introduce a deep deconvolution network that improves the segmentation masks. We also introduce a new dataset and experimented our proposed method on it along with several widely adopted benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. By comparing our results with those from several state-of-the-art models, we show the promising potential of our method.