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The rapid adoption of facial recognition (FR) technology by both government and commercial entities in recent years has raised concerns about civil liberties and privacy. In response, a broad suite of so-called "anti-facial recognition" (AFR) tools has been developed to help users avoid unwanted facial recognition. The set of AFR tools proposed in the last few years is wide-ranging and rapidly evolving, necessitating a step back to consider the broader design space of AFR systems and long-term challenges. This paper aims to fill that gap and provides the first comprehensive analysis of the AFR research landscape. Using the operational stages of FR systems as a starting point, we create a systematic framework for analyzing the benefits and tradeoffs of different AFR approaches. We then consider both technical and social challenges facing AFR tools and propose directions for future research in this field.

Robotics, automation, and related Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have become pervasive bringing in concerns related to security, safety, accuracy, and trust. With growing dependency on physical robots that work in close proximity to humans, the security of these systems is becoming increasingly important to prevent cyber-attacks that could lead to privacy invasion, critical operations sabotage, and bodily harm. The current shortfall of professionals who can defend such systems demands development and integration of such a curriculum. This course description includes details about seven self-contained and adaptive modules on "AI security threats against pervasive robotic systems". Topics include: 1) Introduction, examples of attacks, and motivation; 2) - Robotic AI attack surfaces and penetration testing; 3) - Attack patterns and security strategies for input sensors; 4) - Training attacks and associated security strategies; 5) - Inference attacks and associated security strategies; 6) - Actuator attacks and associated security strategies; and 7) - Ethics of AI, robotics, and cybersecurity.

Observational studies of causal effects require adjustment for confounding factors. In the tabular setting, where these factors are well-defined, separate random variables, the effect of confounding is well understood. However, in public policy, ecology, and in medicine, decisions are often made in non-tabular settings, informed by patterns or objects detected in images (e.g., maps, satellite or tomography imagery). Using such imagery for causal inference presents an opportunity because objects in the image may be related to the treatment and outcome of interest. In these cases, we rely on the images to adjust for confounding but observed data do not directly label the existence of the important objects. Motivated by real-world applications, we formalize this challenge, how it can be handled, and what conditions are sufficient to identify and estimate causal effects. We analyze finite-sample performance using simulation experiments, estimating effects using a propensity adjustment algorithm that employs a machine learning model to estimate the image confounding. Our experiments also examine sensitivity to misspecification of the image pattern mechanism. Finally, we use our methodology to estimate the effects of policy interventions on poverty in African communities from satellite imagery.

Feature fusion plays a crucial role in unconstrained face recognition where inputs (probes or galleries) comprise of a set of N low quality images whose individual qualities vary. Advances in attention and recurrent modules have led to feature fusion that can model the relationship among the images in the input set. However, attention mechanisms cannot scale to large N due to their quadratic complexity and recurrent modules suffer from input order sensitivity. We propose a two-stage feature fusion paradigm, Cluster and Aggregate, that can both scale to large N and maintain the ability to perform sequential inference with order invariance. Specifically, Cluster stage is a linear assignment of N inputs to M global cluster centers, and Aggregation stage is a fusion over M clustered features. The clustered features play an integral role when the inputs are sequential as they can serve as a summarization of past features. By leveraging the order-invariance of incremental averaging operation, we design an update rule that achieves batch-order invariance, which guarantees that the contributions of early image in the sequence do not diminish as time steps increase. Experiments on IJB-B and IJB-S benchmark datasets show the superiority of the proposed two-stage paradigm in unconstrained face recognition. Code and pretrained models are available in Link.

Existing work in document-level neural machine translation commonly concatenates several consecutive sentences as a pseudo-document, and then learns inter-sentential dependencies. This strategy limits the model's ability to leverage information from distant context. We overcome this limitation with a novel Document Flattening (DocFlat) technique that integrates Flat-Batch Attention (FBA) and Neural Context Gate (NCG) into Transformer model to utilize information beyond the pseudo-document boundaries. FBA allows the model to attend to all the positions in the batch and learns the relationships between positions explicitly and NCG identifies the useful information from the distant context. We conduct comprehensive experiments and analyses on three benchmark datasets for English-German translation, and validate the effectiveness of two variants of DocFlat. Empirical results show that our approach outperforms strong baselines with statistical significance on BLEU, COMET and accuracy on the contrastive test set. The analyses highlight that DocFlat is highly effective in capturing the long-range information.

Blazars are active galactic nuclei with relativistic jets pointed almost directly at Earth. Blazars are characterized by strong, apparently stochastic flux variability at virtually all observed wavelengths and timescales, from minutes to years, the physical origin of which is still poorly understood. In the high-energy gamma-ray band, the Large Area Telescope aboard the Fermi space telescope (Fermi-LAT) has conducted regular monitoring of thousands of blazars since 2008. Deep learning can help uncover structure in gamma-ray blazars' complex variability patterns that traditional methods based on parametric statistical modeling or manual feature engineering may miss. In this work, we propose using a self-supervised Transformer encoder architecture to construct an effective representation of blazar gamma-ray variability. Measurement errors, upper limits, and missing data are accommodated using learned encodings. The model predicts a set of quantiles for the flux probability distribution at each time step, an architecture naturally suited for describing data generated by a stochastic process. As a proof of concept for how the model output can be analyzed to extract scientifically relevant information, a preliminary search for weekly-timescale time-reversal asymmetry in gamma-ray blazar light curves was conducted, finding no significant evidence for asymmetry.

Selecting the number of topics in LDA models is considered to be a difficult task, for which alternative approaches have been proposed. The performance of the recently developed singular Bayesian information criterion (sBIC) is evaluated and compared to the performance of alternative model selection criteria. The sBIC is a generalization of the standard BIC that can be implemented to singular statistical models. The comparison is based on Monte Carlo simulations and carried out for several alternative settings, varying with respect to the number of topics, the number of documents and the size of documents in the corpora. Performance is measured using different criteria which take into account the correct number of topics, but also whether the relevant topics from the DGPs are identified. Practical recommendations for LDA model selection in applications are derived.

There are two types of particles in the universe: bosons and fermions. Bosons include force carriers, such as photons and gluons, and fermions include matter particles like quarks and electrons. Each particle can be in a certain mode (e.g., a position or state). For a system of n particles, a configuration of the system is described by specifying how many particles are in each of m modes. Bosons are particles where multiple occupancy of a mode is allowed, whereas fermions are particles where multiple occupancy is forbidden; that is, two or more fermions cannot occupy the same mode at once (this is the Pauli exclusion principle).

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are currently the most promising paradigm for dealing with graph-structure data, while recent studies have also shown that GCNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Thus developing GCN models that are robust to such attacks become a hot research topic. However, the structural purification learning-based or robustness constraints-based defense GCN methods are usually designed for specific data or attacks, and introduce additional objective that is not for classification. Extra training overhead is also required in their design. To address these challenges, we conduct in-depth explorations on mid-frequency signals on graphs and propose a simple yet effective Mid-pass filter GCN (Mid-GCN). Theoretical analyses guarantee the robustness of signals through the mid-pass filter, and we also shed light on the properties of different frequency signals under adversarial attacks. Extensive experiments on six benchmark graph data further verify the effectiveness of our designed Mid-GCN in node classification accuracy compared to state-of-the-art GCNs under various adversarial attack strategies.