Keyword spotting (KWS) based on deep neural networks (DNNs) has achieved massive success in voice control scenarios. However, training of such DNN-based KWS systems often requires significant data and hardware resources. Manufacturers often entrust this process to a third-party platform. This makes the training process uncontrollable, where attackers can implant backdoors in the model by manipulating third-party training data. An effective backdoor attack can force the model to make specified judgments under certain conditions, i.e., triggers. In this paper, we design a backdoor attack scheme based on Voiceprint Selection and Voice Conversion, abbreviated as VSVC. Experimental results demonstrated that VSVC is feasible to achieve an average attack success rate close to 97% in four victim models when poisoning less than 1% of the training data.

The development of deep neural networks has improved representation learning in various domains, including textual, graph structural, and relational triple representations. This development opened the door to new relation extraction beyond the traditional text-oriented relation extraction. However, research on the effectiveness of considering multiple heterogeneous domain information simultaneously is still under exploration, and if a model can take an advantage of integrating heterogeneous information, it is expected to exhibit a significant contribution to many problems in the world. This thesis works on Drug-Drug Interactions (DDIs) from the literature as a case study and realizes relation extraction utilizing heterogeneous domain information. First, a deep neural relation extraction model is prepared and its attention mechanism is analyzed. Next, a method to combine the drug molecular structure information and drug description information to the input sentence information is proposed, and the effectiveness of utilizing drug molecular structures and drug descriptions for the relation extraction task is shown. Then, in order to further exploit the heterogeneous information, drug-related items, such as protein entries, medical terms and pathways are collected from multiple existing databases and a new data set in the form of a knowledge graph (KG) is constructed. A link prediction task on the constructed data set is conducted to obtain embedding representations of drugs that contain the heterogeneous domain information. Finally, a method that integrates the input sentence information and the heterogeneous KG information is proposed. The proposed model is trained and evaluated on a widely used data set, and as a result, it is shown that utilizing heterogeneous domain information significantly improves the performance of relation extraction from the literature.

We explore the use of knowledge distillation (KD) for learning compact and accurate models that enable classification of animal behavior from accelerometry data on wearable devices. To this end, we take a deep and complex convolutional neural network, known as residual neural network (ResNet), as the teacher model. ResNet is specifically designed for multivariate time-series classification. We use ResNet to distill the knowledge of animal behavior classification datasets into soft labels, which consist of the predicted pseudo-probabilities of every class for each datapoint. We then use the soft labels to train our significantly less complex student models, which are based on the gated recurrent unit (GRU) and multilayer perceptron (MLP). The evaluation results using two real-world animal behavior classification datasets show that the classification accuracy of the student GRU-MLP models improves appreciably through KD, approaching that of the teacher ResNet model. To further reduce the computational and memory requirements of performing inference using the student models trained via KD, we utilize dynamic fixed-point quantization (DQ) through an appropriate modification of the computational graph of the considered models. We implement both unquantized and quantized versions of the developed KD-based models on the embedded systems of our purpose-built collar and ear tag devices to classify animal behavior in situ and in real time. Our evaluations corroborate the effectiveness of KD and DQ in improving the accuracy and efficiency of in-situ animal behavior classification.

The phenomenon of image quality degradation in hazy weather has a negative impact on photography work. The contrast of the image will decrease and the color will shift. Meantime, the texture and edge of objects in the scene will become blurred. As shown in Figure 1, there is an obvious difference between the pixel histograms of hazy and haze-free images. For computer vision tasks such as object detection and image segmentation, low-quality inputs can degrade the performance of the models trained on haze-free images. Therefore, many researchers try to recover high-quality clear scenes from hazy images. Before deep learning was widely used in computer vision tasks, image dehazing algorithms had mainly relied on various prior assumptions [51] Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.

Avatar: The Way of Water is a 192-minute film about a family of blue aliens who enjoy riding dragons and are taught to ride fish and befriend whale aliens--whaliens, if you will--by another tribe of aliens, who are teal. Together, they must resist the nature-hating marines who ride around in robots and, in a shocking betrayal of the correct order of things, have cloned a squadron of themselves into blue alien bodies. The film's director, James Cameron, has shot the whole thing in 3D, and much of it, especially the action scenes, is also displayed at a special high frame rate, which looks like Cameron has personally switched on an obscure setting in your brain. To see a James Cameron movie is to remember that in rare cases it does not matter whether a film is good so long as the film is fucking awesome, and those are the cases on which Cameron has built his filmography. That some of his movies are also good--the Terminator films, Aliens, The Abyss--is more a matter of coincidence.

Disabled astronauts-in-training have completed a zero-gravity flight 25,000ft above Earth to help understand how spacesuits and space vessels can be made more accessible. The crew of 14, who have mobility, vision and hearing difficulties, experienced weightlessness and carried out a number of tests to see what could be done to improve accessibility. The group, who were from five different countries, including Australia, Brazil, Germany, Spain and the US, was made up of scientists, engineers and doctors. The groundbreaking trip, organised by AstroAccess, happened on a Zero-G aircraft in Houston, Texas on Thursday. Disabled astronauts-in-training have completed a zero-gravity flight 25,000ft above Earth to help understand how spacesuits and space vessels can be made more accessible.

Existing integrity verification approaches for deep models are designed for private verification (i.e., assuming the service provider is honest, with white-box access to model parameters). However, private verification approaches do not allow model users to verify the model at run-time. Instead, they must trust the service provider, who may tamper with the verification results. In contrast, a public verification approach that considers the possibility of dishonest service providers can benefit a wider range of users. In this paper, we propose PublicCheck, a practical public integrity verification solution for services of run-time deep models. PublicCheck considers dishonest service providers, and overcomes public verification challenges of being lightweight, providing anti-counterfeiting protection, and having fingerprinting samples that appear smooth. To capture and fingerprint the inherent prediction behaviors of a run-time model, PublicCheck generates smoothly transformed and augmented encysted samples that are enclosed around the model's decision boundary while ensuring that the verification queries are indistinguishable from normal queries. PublicCheck is also applicable when knowledge of the target model is limited (e.g., with no knowledge of gradients or model parameters). A thorough evaluation of PublicCheck demonstrates the strong capability for model integrity breach detection (100% detection accuracy with less than 10 black-box API queries) against various model integrity attacks and model compression attacks. PublicCheck also demonstrates the smooth appearance, feasibility, and efficiency of generating a plethora of encysted samples for fingerprinting.

With the rise in high resolution remote sensing technologies there has been an explosion in the amount of data available for forest monitoring, and an accompanying growth in artificial intelligence applications to automatically derive forest properties of interest from these datasets. Many studies use their own data at small spatio-temporal scales, and demonstrate an application of an existing or adapted data science method for a particular task. This approach often involves intensive and time-consuming data collection and processing, but generates results restricted to specific ecosystems and sensor types. There is a lack of widespread acknowledgement of how the types and structures of data used affects performance and accuracy of analysis algorithms. To accelerate progress in the field more efficiently, benchmarking datasets upon which methods can be tested and compared are sorely needed. Here, we discuss how lack of standardisation impacts confidence in estimation of key forest properties, and how considerations of data collection need to be accounted for in assessing method performance. We present pragmatic requirements and considerations for the creation of rigorous, useful benchmarking datasets for forest monitoring applications, and discuss how tools from modern data science can improve use of existing data. We list a set of example large-scale datasets that could contribute to benchmarking, and present a vision for how community-driven, representative benchmarking initiatives could benefit the field.

Federated learning (FL) allows multiple clients cooperatively train models without disclosing local data. However, the existing works fail to address all these practical concerns in FL: limited communication resources, dynamic network conditions and heterogeneous client properties, which slow down the convergence of FL. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a heterogeneity-aware FL framework, called FedCG, with adaptive client selection and gradient compression. Specifically, the parameter server (PS) selects a representative client subset considering statistical heterogeneity and sends the global model to them. After local training, these selected clients upload compressed model updates matching their capabilities to the PS for aggregation, which significantly alleviates the communication load and mitigates the straggler effect. We theoretically analyze the impact of both client selection and gradient compression on convergence performance. Guided by the derived convergence rate, we develop an iteration-based algorithm to jointly optimize client selection and compression ratio decision using submodular maximization and linear programming. Extensive experiments on both real-world prototypes and simulations show that FedCG can provide up to 5.3$\times$ speedup compared to other methods.

Cancer is one of the most challenging diseases because of its complexity, variability, and diversity of causes. It has been one of the major research topics over the past decades, yet it is still poorly understood. To this end, multifaceted therapeutic frameworks are indispensable. \emph{Anticancer peptides} (ACPs) are the most promising treatment option, but their large-scale identification and synthesis require reliable prediction methods, which is still a problem. In this paper, we present an intuitive classification strategy that differs from the traditional \emph{black box} method and is based on the well-known statistical theory of \emph{sparse-representation classification} (SRC). Specifically, we create over-complete dictionary matrices by embedding the \emph{composition of the K-spaced amino acid pairs} (CKSAAP). Unlike the traditional SRC frameworks, we use an efficient \emph{matching pursuit} solver instead of the computationally expensive \emph{basis pursuit} solver in this strategy. Furthermore, the \emph{kernel principal component analysis} (KPCA) is employed to cope with non-linearity and dimension reduction of the feature space whereas the \emph{synthetic minority oversampling technique} (SMOTE) is used to balance the dictionary. The proposed method is evaluated on two benchmark datasets for well-known statistical parameters and is found to outperform the existing methods. The results show the highest sensitivity with the most balanced accuracy, which might be beneficial in understanding structural and chemical aspects and developing new ACPs. The Google-Colab implementation of the proposed method is available at the author's GitHub page (\href{https://github.com/ehtisham-Fazal/ACP-Kernel-SRC}{https://github.com/ehtisham-fazal/ACP-Kernel-SRC}).