Autonomous Vehicles (AV) are expected to bring considerable benefits to society, such as traffic optimization and accidents reduction. They rely heavily on advances in many Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches and techniques. However, while some researchers in this field believe AI is the core element to enhance safety, others believe AI imposes new challenges to assure the safety of these new AI-based systems and applications. In this non-convergent context, this paper presents a systematic literature review to paint a clear picture of the state of the art of the literature in AI on AV safety. Based on an initial sample of 4870 retrieved papers, 59 studies were selected as the result of the selection criteria detailed in the paper. The shortlisted studies were then mapped into six categories to answer the proposed research questions. An AV system model was proposed and applied to orient the discussions about the SLR findings. As a main result, we have reinforced our preliminary observation about the necessity of considering a serious safety agenda for the future studies on AI-based AV systems.

Clustering and community detection with multiple graphs have typically focused on aligned graphs, where there is a mapping between nodes across the graphs (e.g., multi-view, multi-layer, temporal graphs). However, there are numerous application areas with multiple graphs that are only partially aligned, or even unaligned. These graphs are often drawn from the same population, with communities of potentially different sizes that exhibit similar structure. In this paper, we develop a joint stochastic blockmodel (Joint SBM) to estimate shared communities across sets of heterogeneous non-aligned graphs. We derive an efficient spectral clustering approach to learn the parameters of the joint SBM. We evaluate the model on both synthetic and real-world datasets and show that the joint model is able to exploit cross-graph information to better estimate the communities compared to learning separate SBMs on each individual graph.

Adversarial training has shown impressive success in learning bilingual dictionary without any parallel data by mapping monolingual embeddings to a shared space. However, recent work has shown superior performance for non-adversarial methods in more challenging language pairs. In this work, we revisit adversarial autoencoder for unsupervised word translation and propose two novel extensions to it that yield more stable training and improved results. Our method includes regularization terms to enforce cycle consistency and input reconstruction, and puts the target encoders as an adversary against the corresponding discriminator. Extensive experimentations with European, non-European and low-resource languages show that our method is more robust and achieves better performance than recently proposed adversarial and non-adversarial approaches.

Our study employs sentiment analysis to evaluate the compatibility of Amazon.com reviews with their corresponding ratings. Sentiment analysis is the task of identifying and classifying the sentiment expressed in a piece of text as being positive or negative. On e-commerce websites such as Amazon.com, consumers can submit their reviews along with a specific polarity rating. In some instances, there is a mismatch between the review and the rating. To identify the reviews with mismatched ratings we performed sentiment analysis using deep learning on Amazon.com product review data. Product reviews were converted to vectors using paragraph vector, which then was used to train a recurrent neural network with gated recurrent unit. Our model incorporated both semantic relationship of review text and product information. We also developed a web service application that predicts the rating score for a submitted review using the trained model and if there is a mismatch between predicted rating score and submitted rating score, it provides feedback to the reviewer.

Despite some empirical success at correcting exposure bias in machine translation, scheduled sampling algorithms suffer from a major drawback: they incorrectly assume that words in the reference translations and in sampled sequences are aligned at each time step. Our new differentiable sampling algorithm addresses this issue by optimizing the probability that the reference can be aligned with the sampled output, based on a soft alignment predicted by the model itself. As a result, the output distribution at each time step is evaluated with respect to the whole predicted sequence. Experiments on IWSLT translation tasks show that our approach improves BLEU compared to maximum likelihood and scheduled sampling baselines. In addition, our approach is simpler to train with no need for sampling schedule and yields models that achieve larger improvements with smaller beam sizes.

Few-shot learning aims to learn classifiers for new classes with only a few training examples per class. Most existing few-shot learning approaches belong to either metric-based meta-learning or optimization-based meta-learning category, both of which have achieved successes in the simplified "$k$-shot $N$-way" image classification settings. Specifically, the optimization-based approaches train a meta-learner to predict the parameters of the task-specific classifiers. The task-specific classifiers are required to be homogeneous-structured to ease the parameter prediction, so the meta-learning approaches could only handle few-shot learning problems where the tasks share a uniform number of classes. The metric-based approaches learn one task-invariant metric for all the tasks. Even though the metric-learning approaches allow different numbers of classes, they require the tasks all coming from a similar domain such that there exists a uniform metric that could work across tasks. In this work, we propose a hybrid meta-learning model called Meta-Metric-Learner which combines the merits of both optimization- and metric-based approaches. Our meta-metric-learning approach consists of two components, a task-specific metric-based learner as a base model, and a meta-learner that learns and specifies the base model. Thus our model is able to handle flexible numbers of classes as well as generate more generalized metrics for classification across tasks. We test our approach in the standard "$k$-shot $N$-way" few-shot learning setting following previous works and a new realistic few-shot setting with flexible class numbers in both single-source form and multi-source forms. Experiments show that our approach can obtain superior performance in all settings.

Despite their unprecedented performance in various domains, utilization of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in safety-critical environments is severely limited in the presence of even small adversarial perturbations. The present work develops a randomized approach to detecting such perturbations based on minimum uncertainty metrics that rely on sampling at the hidden layers during the DNN inference stage. The sampling probabilities are designed for effective detection of the adversarially corrupted inputs. Being modular, the novel detector of adversaries can be conveniently employed by any pre-trained DNN at no extra training overhead. Selecting which units to sample per hidden layer entails quantifying the amount of DNN output uncertainty from the viewpoint of Bayesian neural networks, where the overall uncertainty is expressed in terms of its layer-wise components - what also promotes scalability. Sampling probabilities are then sought by minimizing uncertainty measures layer-by-layer, leading to a novel convex optimization problem that admits an exact solver with superlinear convergence rate. By simplifying the objective function, low-complexity approximate solvers are also developed. In addition to valuable insights, these approximations link the novel approach with state-of-the-art randomized adversarial detectors. The effectiveness of the novel detectors in the context of competing alternatives is highlighted through extensive tests for various types of adversarial attacks with variable levels of strength.

A framework previously introduced in [3] for solving a sequence of stochastic optimization problems with bounded changes in the minimizers is extended and applied to machine learning problems such as regression and classification. The stochastic optimization problems arising in these machine learning problems is solved using algorithms such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD). A method based on estimates of the change in the minimizers and properties of the optimization algorithm is introduced for adaptively selecting the number of samples at each time step to ensure that the excess risk, i.e., the expected gap between the loss achieved by the approximate minimizer produced by the optimization algorithm and the exact minimizer, does not exceed a target level. A bound is developed to show that the estimate of the change in the minimizers is non-trivial provided that the excess risk is small enough. Extensions relevant to the machine learning setting are considered, including a cost-based approach to select the number of samples with a cost budget over a fixed horizon, and an approach to applying cross-validation for model selection. Finally, experiments with synthetic and real data are used to validate the algorithms.

In this paper, we introduce a novel layer designed to be used as the output of pre-trained neural networks in the context of classification. Based on Associative Memories, this layer can help design Deep Neural Networks which support incremental learning and that can be (partially) trained in real time on embedded devices. Experiments on the ImageNet dataset and other different domain specific datasets show that it is possible to design more flexible and faster-to-train Neural Networks at the cost of a slight decrease in accuracy.

Adversarial examples are carefully constructed modifications to an input that completely change the output of a classifier but are imperceptible to humans. Despite these successful attacks for continuous data (such as image and audio samples), generating adversarial examples for discrete structures such as text has proven significantly more challenging. In this paper we formulate the attacks with discrete input on a set function as an optimization task. We prove that this set function is submodular for some popular neural network text classifiers under simplifying assumption. This finding guarantees a $1-1/e$ approximation factor for attacks that use the greedy algorithm. Meanwhile, we show how to use the gradient of the attacked classifier to guide the greedy search. Empirical studies with our proposed optimization scheme show significantly improved attack ability and efficiency, on three different text classification tasks over various baselines. We also use a joint sentence and word paraphrasing technique to maintain the original semantics and syntax of the text. This is validated by a human subject evaluation in subjective metrics on the quality and semantic coherence of our generated adversarial text.