Government
Icy Moon Surface Simulation and Stereo Depth Estimation for Sampling Autonomy
Bhaskara, Ramchander, Georgakis, Georgios, Nash, Jeremy, Cameron, Marissa, Bowkett, Joseph, Ansar, Adnan, Majji, Manoranjan, Backes, Paul
Sampling autonomy for icy moon lander missions requires understanding of topographic and photometric properties of the sampling terrain. Unavailability of high resolution visual datasets (either bird-eye view or point-of-view from a lander) is an obstacle for selection, verification or development of perception systems. We attempt to alleviate this problem by: 1) proposing Graphical Utility for Icy moon Surface Simulations (GUISS) framework, for versatile stereo dataset generation that spans the spectrum of bulk photometric properties, and 2) focusing on a stereo-based visual perception system and evaluating both traditional and deep learning-based algorithms for depth estimation from stereo matching. The surface reflectance properties of icy moon terrains (Enceladus and Europa) are inferred from multispectral datasets of previous missions. With procedural terrain generation and physically valid illumination sources, our framework can fit a wide range of hypotheses with respect to visual representations of icy moon terrains. This is followed by a study over the performance of stereo matching algorithms under different visual hypotheses. Finally, we emphasize the standing challenges to be addressed for simulating perception data assets for icy moons such as Enceladus and Europa. Our code can be found here: https://github.com/nasa-jpl/guiss.
Evaluating Roadside Perception for Autonomous Vehicles: Insights from Field Testing
Zhang, Rusheng, Meng, Depu, Shen, Shengyin, Wang, Tinghan, Karir, Tai, Maile, Michael, Liu, Henry X.
Roadside perception systems are increasingly crucial in enhancing traffic safety and facilitating cooperative driving for autonomous vehicles. Despite rapid technological advancements, a major challenge persists for this newly arising field: the absence of standardized evaluation methods and benchmarks for these systems. This limitation hampers the ability to effectively assess and compare the performance of different systems, thus constraining progress in this vital field. This paper introduces a comprehensive evaluation methodology specifically designed to assess the performance of roadside perception systems. Our methodology encompasses measurement techniques, metric selection, and experimental trial design, all grounded in real-world field testing to ensure the practical applicability of our approach. We applied our methodology in Mcity\footnote{\url{https://mcity.umich.edu/}}, a controlled testing environment, to evaluate various off-the-shelf perception systems. This approach allowed for an in-depth comparative analysis of their performance in realistic scenarios, offering key insights into their respective strengths and limitations. The findings of this study are poised to inform the development of industry-standard benchmarks and evaluation methods, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of roadside perception system development and deployment for autonomous vehicles. We anticipate that this paper will stimulate essential discourse on standardizing evaluation methods for roadside perception systems, thus pushing the frontiers of this technology. Furthermore, our results offer both academia and industry a comprehensive understanding of the capabilities of contemporary infrastructure-based perception systems.
SubgroupTE: Advancing Treatment Effect Estimation with Subgroup Identification
Lee, Seungyeon, Liu, Ruoqi, Song, Wenyu, Li, Lang, Zhang, Ping
Precise estimation of treatment effects is crucial for evaluating intervention effectiveness. While deep learning models have exhibited promising performance in learning counterfactual representations for treatment effect estimation (TEE), a major limitation in most of these models is that they treat the entire population as a homogeneous group, overlooking the diversity of treatment effects across potential subgroups that have varying treatment effects. This limitation restricts the ability to precisely estimate treatment effects and provide subgroup-specific treatment recommendations. In this paper, we propose a novel treatment effect estimation model, named SubgroupTE, which incorporates subgroup identification in TEE. SubgroupTE identifies heterogeneous subgroups with different treatment responses and more precisely estimates treatment effects by considering subgroup-specific causal effects. In addition, SubgroupTE iteratively optimizes subgrouping and treatment effect estimation networks to enhance both estimation and subgroup identification. Comprehensive experiments on the synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets exhibit the outstanding performance of SubgroupTE compared with the state-of-the-art models on treatment effect estimation. Additionally, a real-world study demonstrates the capabilities of SubgroupTE in enhancing personalized treatment recommendations for patients with opioid use disorder (OUD) by advancing treatment effect estimation with subgroup identification.
Contrastive Learning and Cycle Consistency-based Transductive Transfer Learning for Target Annotation
Sami, Shoaib Meraj, Hasan, Md Mahedi, Nasrabadi, Nasser M., Rao, Raghuveer
Annotating automatic target recognition (ATR) is a highly challenging task, primarily due to the unavailability of labeled data in the target domain. Hence, it is essential to construct an optimal target domain classifier by utilizing the labeled information of the source domain images. The transductive transfer learning (TTL) method that incorporates a CycleGAN-based unpaired domain translation network has been previously proposed in the literature for effective ATR annotation. Although this method demonstrates great potential for ATR, it severely suffers from lower annotation performance, higher Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) score, and the presence of visual artifacts in the synthetic images. To address these issues, we propose a hybrid contrastive learning base unpaired domain translation (H-CUT) network that achieves a significantly lower FID score. It incorporates both attention and entropy to emphasize the domain-specific region, a noisy feature mixup module to generate high variational synthetic negative patches, and a modulated noise contrastive estimation (MoNCE) loss to reweight all negative patches using optimal transport for better performance. Our proposed contrastive learning and cycle-consistency-based TTL (C3TTL) framework consists of two H-CUT networks and two classifiers. It simultaneously optimizes cycle-consistency, MoNCE, and identity losses. In C3TTL, two H-CUT networks have been employed through a bijection mapping to feed the reconstructed source domain images into a pretrained classifier to guide the optimal target domain classifier. Extensive experimental analysis conducted on three ATR datasets demonstrates that the proposed C3TTL method is effective in annotating civilian and military vehicles, as well as ship targets.
Machine learning-based network intrusion detection for big and imbalanced data using oversampling, stacking feature embedding and feature extraction
Talukder, Md. Alamin, Islam, Md. Manowarul, Uddin, Md Ashraf, Hasan, Khondokar Fida, Sharmin, Selina, Alyami, Salem A., Moni, Mohammad Ali
Cybersecurity has emerged as a critical global concern. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) play a critical role in protecting interconnected networks by detecting malicious actors and activities. Machine Learning (ML)-based behavior analysis within the IDS has considerable potential for detecting dynamic cyber threats, identifying abnormalities, and identifying malicious conduct within the network. However, as the number of data grows, dimension reduction becomes an increasingly difficult task when training ML models. Addressing this, our paper introduces a novel ML-based network intrusion detection model that uses Random Oversampling (RO) to address data imbalance and Stacking Feature Embedding based on clustering results, as well as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for dimension reduction and is specifically designed for large and imbalanced datasets. This model's performance is carefully evaluated using three cutting-edge benchmark datasets: UNSW-NB15, CIC-IDS-2017, and CIC-IDS-2018. On the UNSW-NB15 dataset, our trials show that the RF and ET models achieve accuracy rates of 99.59% and 99.95%, respectively. Furthermore, using the CIC-IDS2017 dataset, DT, RF, and ET models reach 99.99% accuracy, while DT and RF models obtain 99.94% accuracy on CIC-IDS2018. These performance results continuously outperform the state-of-art, indicating significant progress in the field of network intrusion detection. This achievement demonstrates the efficacy of the suggested methodology, which can be used practically to accurately monitor and identify network traffic intrusions, thereby blocking possible threats.
Temporal Blind Spots in Large Language Models
Wallat, Jonas, Jatowt, Adam, Anand, Avishek
Large language models (LLMs) have recently gained significant attention due to their unparalleled ability to perform various natural language processing tasks. These models, benefiting from their advanced natural language understanding capabilities, have demonstrated impressive zero-shot performance. However, the pre-training data utilized in LLMs is often confined to a specific corpus, resulting in inherent freshness and temporal scope limitations. Consequently, this raises concerns regarding the effectiveness of LLMs for tasks involving temporal intents. In this study, we aim to investigate the underlying limitations of general-purpose LLMs when deployed for tasks that require a temporal understanding. We pay particular attention to handling factual temporal knowledge through three popular temporal QA datasets. Specifically, we observe low performance on detailed questions about the past and, surprisingly, for rather new information. In manual and automatic testing, we find multiple temporal errors and characterize the conditions under which QA performance deteriorates. Our analysis contributes to understanding LLM limitations and offers valuable insights into developing future models that can better cater to the demands of temporally-oriented tasks. The code is available\footnote{https://github.com/jwallat/temporalblindspots}.
CloSe: A 3D Clothing Segmentation Dataset and Model
Antić, Dimitrije, Tiwari, Garvita, Ozcomlekci, Batuhan, Marin, Riccardo, Pons-Moll, Gerard
3D Clothing modeling and datasets play crucial role in the entertainment, animation, and digital fashion industries. Existing work often lacks detailed semantic understanding or uses synthetic datasets, lacking realism and personalization. To address this, we first introduce CloSe-D: a novel large-scale dataset containing 3D clothing segmentation of 3167 scans, covering a range of 18 distinct clothing classes. Additionally, we propose CloSe-Net, the first learning-based 3D clothing segmentation model for fine-grained segmentation from colored point clouds. CloSe-Net uses local point features, body-clothing correlation, and a garment-class and point features-based attention module, improving performance over baselines and prior work. The proposed attention module enables our model to learn appearance and geometry-dependent clothing prior from data. We further validate the efficacy of our approach by successfully segmenting publicly available datasets of people in clothing. We also introduce CloSe-T, a 3D interactive tool for refining segmentation labels. Combining the tool with CloSe-T in a continual learning setup demonstrates improved generalization on real-world data. Dataset, model, and tool can be found at https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/close3dv24/.
The Effect of Predictive Formal Modelling at Runtime on Performance in Human-Swarm Interaction
Abioye, Ayodeji O., Hunt, William, Gu, Yue, Schneiders, Eike, Naiseh, Mohammad, Fischer, Joel E., Ramchurn, Sarvapali D., Soorati, Mohammad D., Archibald, Blair, Sevegnani, Michele
Formal Modelling is often used as part of the design and testing process of software development to ensure that components operate within suitable bounds even in unexpected circumstances. In this paper, we use predictive formal modelling (PFM) at runtime in a human-swarm mission and show that this integration can be used to improve the performance of human-swarm teams. We recruited 60 participants to operate a simulated aerial swarm to deliver parcels to target locations. In the PFM condition, operators were informed of the estimated completion times given the number of drones deployed, whereas in the No-PFM condition, operators did not have this information. The operators could control the mission by adding or removing drones from the mission and thereby, increasing or decreasing the overall mission cost. The evaluation of human-swarm performance relied on four key metrics: the time taken to complete tasks, the number of agents involved, the total number of tasks accomplished, and the overall cost associated with the human-swarm task. Our results show that PFM modelling at runtime improves mission performance without significantly affecting the operator's workload or the system's usability.
PsySafe: A Comprehensive Framework for Psychological-based Attack, Defense, and Evaluation of Multi-agent System Safety
Zhang, Zaibin, Zhang, Yongting, Li, Lijun, Gao, Hongzhi, Wang, Lijun, Lu, Huchuan, Zhao, Feng, Qiao, Yu, Shao, Jing
Multi-agent systems, augmented with Large Language Models (LLMs), demonstrate significant capabilities for collective intelligence. However, the potential misuse of this intelligence for malicious purposes presents significant risks. To date, comprehensive research on the safety issues associated with multi-agent systems remains limited. From the perspective of agent psychology, we discover that the dark psychological states of agents can lead to severe safety issues. To address these issues, we propose a comprehensive framework grounded in agent psychology. In our framework, we focus on three aspects: identifying how dark personality traits in agents might lead to risky behaviors, designing defense strategies to mitigate these risks, and evaluating the safety of multi-agent systems from both psychological and behavioral perspectives. Our experiments reveal several intriguing phenomena, such as the collective dangerous behaviors among agents, agents' propensity for self-reflection when engaging in dangerous behavior, and the correlation between agents' psychological assessments and their dangerous behaviors. We anticipate that our framework and observations will provide valuable insights for further research into the safety of multi-agent systems. We will make our data and code publicly accessible at https:/github.com/AI4Good24/PsySafe.
AI for social science and social science of AI: A Survey
Xu, Ruoxi, Sun, Yingfei, Ren, Mengjie, Guo, Shiguang, Pan, Ruotong, Lin, Hongyu, Sun, Le, Han, Xianpei
Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly with the emergence of large language models (LLMs), have sparked a rethinking of artificial general intelligence possibilities. The increasing human-like capabilities of AI are also attracting attention in social science research, leading to various studies exploring the combination of these two fields. In this survey, we systematically categorize previous explorations in the combination of AI and social science into two directions that share common technical approaches but differ in their research objectives. The first direction is focused on AI for social science, where AI is utilized as a powerful tool to enhance various stages of social science research. While the second direction is the social science of AI, which examines AI agents as social entities with their human-like cognitive and linguistic capabilities. By conducting a thorough review, particularly on the substantial progress facilitated by recent advancements in large language models, this paper introduces a fresh perspective to reassess the relationship between AI and social science, provides a cohesive framework that allows researchers to understand the distinctions and connections between AI for social science and social science of AI, and also summarized state-of-art experiment simulation platforms to facilitate research in these two directions. We believe that as AI technology continues to advance and intelligent agents find increasing applications in our daily lives, the significance of the combination of AI and social science will become even more prominent.