Oceania
Researchers Identify a Resilient Trait of Deepfakes That Could Aid Long-Term Detection
Since the earliest deepfake detection solutions began to emerge in 2018, the computer vision and security research sector has been seeking to define an essential characteristic of deepfake videos – signals that could prove resistant to improvements in popular facial synthesis technologies (such as autoencoder-based deepfake packages like DeepFaceLab and FaceSwap, and the use of Generative Adversarial Networks to recreate, simulate or alter human faces). Many of the'tells', such as lack of blinking, were made redundant by improvements in deepfakes, whereas the potential use of digital provenance techniques (such as the Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative) – including blockchain approaches and digital watermarking of potential source photos – either require sweeping and expensive changes to the existing body of available source images on the internet, or else would need a notable cooperative effort among nations and governments to create systems of invigilation and authentication. Therefore it would be very useful if a truly fundamental and resilient trait could be discerned in image and video content that features altered, invented, or identity-swapped human faces; a characteristic that could be inferred directly from falsified videos, without large-scale verification, cryptographic asset hashing, context-checking, plausibility evaluation, artifact-centric detection routines, or other burdensome approaches to deepfake detection. A new research collaboration between China and Australia believes that it has found this'holy grail', in the form of regularity disruption. The authors have devised a method of comparing the spatial integrity and temporal continuity of real videos against those that contain deepfaked content, and have found that any kind of deepfake interference disrupts the regularity of the image, however imperceptibly.
The Future of A.I. Regulation
While I complain publically about the lack of a governing global body for A.I. regulation that's independent, most BigTech firms pretend like they regulate themselves. Nobody actually trusts that they are doing this properly. The most impressive A.I. and tech regulation I've seen is actually coming out of China. The American narrative on this is that they are anti-capitalistic. I find that attitude interesting.
Testing the Robustness of Learned Index Structures
Bachfischer, Matthias, Borovica-Gajic, Renata, Rubinstein, Benjamin I. P.
While early empirical evidence has supported the case for learned index structures as having favourable average-case performance, little is known about their worst-case performance. By contrast, classical structures are known to achieve optimal worst-case behaviour. This work evaluates the robustness of learned index structures in the presence of adversarial workloads. To simulate adversarial workloads, we carry out a data poisoning attack on linear regression models that manipulates the cumulative distribution function (CDF) on which the learned index model is trained. The attack deteriorates the fit of the underlying ML model by injecting a set of poisoning keys into the training dataset, which leads to an increase in the prediction error of the model and thus deteriorates the overall performance of the learned index structure. We assess the performance of various regression methods and the learned index implementations ALEX and PGM-Index. We show that learned index structures can suffer from a significant performance deterioration of up to 20% when evaluated on poisoned vs. non-poisoned datasets.
Robots Enact Malignant Stereotypes
Hundt, Andrew, Agnew, William, Zeng, Vicky, Kacianka, Severin, Gombolay, Matthew
Stereotypes, bias, and discrimination have been extensively documented in Machine Learning (ML) methods such as Computer Vision (CV) [18, 80], Natural Language Processing (NLP) [6], or both, in the case of large image and caption models such as OpenAI CLIP [14]. In this paper, we evaluate how ML bias manifests in robots that physically and autonomously act within the world. We audit one of several recently published CLIP-powered robotic manipulation methods, presenting it with objects that have pictures of human faces on the surface which vary across race and gender, alongside task descriptions that contain terms associated with common stereotypes. Our experiments definitively show robots acting out toxic stereotypes with respect to gender, race, and scientifically-discredited physiognomy, at scale. Furthermore, the audited methods are less likely to recognize Women and People of Color. Our interdisciplinary sociotechnical analysis synthesizes across fields and applications such as Science Technology and Society (STS), Critical Studies, History, Safety, Robotics, and AI. We find that robots powered by large datasets and Dissolution Models (sometimes called "foundation models", e.g. CLIP) that contain humans risk physically amplifying malignant stereotypes in general; and that merely correcting disparities will be insufficient for the complexity and scale of the problem. Instead, we recommend that robot learning methods that physically manifest stereotypes or other harmful outcomes be paused, reworked, or even wound down when appropriate, until outcomes can be proven safe, effective, and just. Finally, we discuss comprehensive policy changes and the potential of new interdisciplinary research on topics like Identity Safety Assessment Frameworks and Design Justice to better understand and address these harms.
Boosting the Efficiency of Parametric Detection with Hierarchical Neural Networks
Yan, Jingkai, Colgan, Robert, Wright, John, Márka, Zsuzsa, Bartos, Imre, Márka, Szabolcs
Gravitational wave astronomy is a vibrant field that leverages both classic and modern data processing techniques for the understanding of the universe. Various approaches have been proposed for improving the efficiency of the detection scheme, with hierarchical matched filtering being an important strategy. Meanwhile, deep learning methods have recently demonstrated both consistency with matched filtering methods and remarkable statistical performance. In this work, we propose Hierarchical Detection Network (HDN), a novel approach to efficient detection that combines ideas from hierarchical matching and deep learning. The network is trained using a novel loss function, which encodes simultaneously the goals of statistical accuracy and efficiency. We discuss the source of complexity reduction of the proposed model, and describe a general recipe for initialization with each layer specializing in different regions. We demonstrate the performance of HDN with experiments using open LIGO data and synthetic injections, and observe with two-layer models a $79\%$ efficiency gain compared with matched filtering at an equal error rate of $0.2\%$. Furthermore, we show how training a three-layer HDN initialized using two-layer model can further boost both accuracy and efficiency, highlighting the power of multiple simple layers in efficient detection.
Composing RNNs and FSTs for Small Data: Recovering Missing Characters in Old Hawaiian Text
Jones, Oiwi Parker, Shillingford, Brendan
In contrast to the older writing system of the 19th century, modern Hawaiian orthography employs characters for long vowels and glottal stops. These extra characters account for about one-third of the phonemes in Hawaiian, so including them makes a big difference to reading comprehension and pronunciation. However, transliterating between older and newer texts is a laborious task when performed manually. We introduce two related methods to help solve this transliteration problem automatically, given that there were not enough data to train an end-to-end deep learning model. One method is implemented, end-to-end, using finite state transducers (FSTs). The other is a hybrid deep learning approach which approximately composes an FST with a recurrent neural network (RNN). We find that the hybrid approach outperforms the end-to-end FST by partitioning the original problem into one part that can be modelled by hand, using an FST, and into another part, which is easily solved by an RNN trained on the available data.
Experience with Abrupt Transition to Remote Teaching of Embedded Systems
Koniarik, Jan, Dlhopolcek, Daniel, Ukrop, Martin
Due to the pandemic of COVID-19, many university courses had to abruptly transform to enable remote teaching. Adjusting courses on embedded systems and micro-controllers was extra challenging since interaction with real hardware is their integral part. We start by comparing our experience with four basic alternatives of teaching embedded systems: 1) interacting with hardware at school, 2) having remote access to hardware, 3) lending hardware to students for at-home work and 4) virtualizing hardware. Afterward, we evaluate in detail our experience of the fast transition from traditional, offline at-school hardware programming course to using remote access to real hardware present in the lab. The somewhat unusual remote hardware access approach turned out to be a fully viable alternative for teaching embedded systems, enabling a relatively low-effort transition. Our setup is based on existing solutions and stable open technologies without the need for custom-developed applications that require high maintenance. We evaluate the experience of both the students and teachers and condense takeaways for future courses. The specific environment setup is available online as an inspiration for others.
Enhancing Document-level Relation Extraction by Entity Knowledge Injection
Wang, Xinyi, Wang, Zitao, Sun, Weijian, Hu, Wei
Document-level relation extraction (RE) aims to identify the relations between entities throughout an entire document. It needs complex reasoning skills to synthesize various knowledge such as coreferences and commonsense. Large-scale knowledge graphs (KGs) contain a wealth of real-world facts, and can provide valuable knowledge to document-level RE. In this paper, we propose an entity knowledge injection framework to enhance current document-level RE models. Specifically, we introduce coreference distillation to inject coreference knowledge, endowing an RE model with the more general capability of coreference reasoning. We also employ representation reconciliation to inject factual knowledge and aggregate KG representations and document representations into a unified space.
Intelligent 3D Network Protocol for Multimedia Data Classification using Deep Learning
Syed, Arslan, Aldhahri, Eman A., Iqbal, Muhammad Munawar, Ali, Abid, Muthanna, Ammar, Jamil, Harun, Jamil, Faisal
In videos, the human's actions are of three-dimensional (3D) signals. These videos investigate the spatiotemporal knowledge of human behavior. The promising ability is investigated using 3D convolution neural networks (CNNs). The 3D CNNs have not yet achieved high output for their well-established two-dimensional (2D) equivalents in still photographs. Board 3D Convolutional Memory and Spatiotemporal fusion face training difficulty preventing 3D CNN from accomplishing remarkable evaluation. In this paper, we implement Hybrid Deep Learning Architecture that combines STIP and 3D CNN features to enhance the performance of 3D videos effectively. After implementation, the more detailed and deeper charting for training in each circle of space-time fusion. The training model further enhances the results after handling complicated evaluations of models. The video classification model is used in this implemented model. Intelligent 3D Network Protocol for Multimedia Data Classification using Deep Learning is introduced to further understand spacetime association in human endeavors. In the implementation of the result, the well-known dataset, i.e., UCF101 to, evaluates the performance of the proposed hybrid technique. The results beat the proposed hybrid technique that substantially beats the initial 3D CNNs. The results are compared with state-of-the-art frameworks from literature for action recognition on UCF101 with an accuracy of 95%.
Top challenge to internet health is AI power disparity and harm, Mozilla says
The top challenge for the health of the internet is the power disparity between who benefits from AI and who is harmed by AI, Mozilla's new 2022 Internet Health reveals. Once again, this new report puts AI under the spotlight for how companies and governments use the technology. Mozilla's report scrutinized the nature of the AI-driven world citing real examples from different countries. TechRepublic spoke to Solana Larsen, Mozilla's Internet Health report editor, to shed light on the concept of "Responsible AI from the Start," black box AI, the future of regulations and how some AI projects lead by example. Larsen explains that AI systems should be built from the start considering ethics and responsibility, not tacked on at a later date when the harms begin to emerge.