In adversarial machine learning, new defenses against attacks on deep learning systems are routinely broken soon after their release by more powerful attacks. In this context, forensic tools can offer a valuable complement to existing defenses, by tracing back a successful attack to its root cause, and offering a path forward for mitigation to prevent similar attacks in the future. In this paper, we describe our efforts in developing a forensic traceback tool for poison attacks on deep neural networks. We propose a novel iterative clustering and pruning solution that trims "innocent" training samples, until all that remains is the set of poisoned data responsible for the attack. Our method clusters training samples based on their impact on model parameters, then uses an efficient data unlearning method to prune innocent clusters. We empirically demonstrate the efficacy of our system on three types of dirty-label (backdoor) poison attacks and three types of clean-label poison attacks, across domains of computer vision and malware classification. Our system achieves over 98.4% precision and 96.8% recall across all attacks. We also show that our system is robust against four anti-forensics measures specifically designed to attack it.

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has been pivotal in finding optimal network configurations for Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs). While many methods explore NAS from a global search-space perspective, the employed optimization schemes typically require heavy computational resources. This work introduces a method that is efficient in computationally constrained environments by examining the micro-search space of channel size. In tackling channel-size optimization, we design an automated algorithm to extract the dependencies within different connected layers of the network. In addition, we introduce the idea of knowledge distillation, which enables preservation of trained weights, admist trials where the channel sizes are changing. Further, since the standard performance indicators (accuracy, loss) fail to capture the performance of individual network components (providing an overall network evaluation), we introduce a novel metric that highly correlates with test accuracy and enables analysis of individual network layers. Combining dependency extraction, metrics, and knowledge distillation, we introduce an efficient searching algorithm, with simulated annealing inspired stochasticity, and demonstrate its effectiveness in finding optimal architectures that outperform baselines by a large margin.

Low earth orbit (LEO) satellite-assisted communications have been considered as one of key elements in beyond 5G systems to provide wide coverage and cost-efficient data services. Such dynamic space-terrestrial topologies impose exponential increase in the degrees of freedom in network management. In this paper, we address two practical issues for an over-loaded LEO-terrestrial system. The first challenge is how to efficiently schedule resources to serve the massive number of connected users, such that more data and users can be delivered/served. The second challenge is how to make the algorithmic solution more resilient in adapting to dynamic wireless environments.To address them, we first propose an iterative suboptimal algorithm to provide an offline benchmark. To adapt to unforeseen variations, we propose an enhanced meta-critic learning algorithm (EMCL), where a hybrid neural network for parameterization and the Wolpertinger policy for action mapping are designed in EMCL. The results demonstrate EMCL's effectiveness and fast-response capabilities in over-loaded systems and in adapting to dynamic environments compare to previous actor-critic and meta-learning methods.

In many contexts, lying -- the use of verbal falsehoods to deceive -- is harmful. While lying has traditionally been a human affair, AI systems that make sophisticated verbal statements are becoming increasingly prevalent. This raises the question of how we should limit the harm caused by AI "lies" (i.e. falsehoods that are actively selected for). Human truthfulness is governed by social norms and by laws (against defamation, perjury, and fraud). Differences between AI and humans present an opportunity to have more precise standards of truthfulness for AI, and to have these standards rise over time. This could provide significant benefits to public epistemics and the economy, and mitigate risks of worst-case AI futures. Establishing norms or laws of AI truthfulness will require significant work to: (1) identify clear truthfulness standards; (2) create institutions that can judge adherence to those standards; and (3) develop AI systems that are robustly truthful. Our initial proposals for these areas include: (1) a standard of avoiding "negligent falsehoods" (a generalisation of lies that is easier to assess); (2) institutions to evaluate AI systems before and after real-world deployment; and (3) explicitly training AI systems to be truthful via curated datasets and human interaction. A concerning possibility is that evaluation mechanisms for eventual truthfulness standards could be captured by political interests, leading to harmful censorship and propaganda. Avoiding this might take careful attention. And since the scale of AI speech acts might grow dramatically over the coming decades, early truthfulness standards might be particularly important because of the precedents they set.

Deep learning has been successfully applied to many classification problems including underwater challenges. However, a long-standing issue with deep learning is the need for large and consistently labeled datasets. Although current approaches in semi-supervised learning can decrease the required amount of annotated data by a factor of 10 or even more, this line of research still uses distinct classes. For underwater classification, and uncurated real-world datasets in general, clean class boundaries can often not be given due to a limited information content in the images and transitional stages of the depicted objects. This leads to different experts having different opinions and thus producing fuzzy labels which could also be considered ambiguous or divergent. We propose a novel framework for handling semi-supervised classifications of such fuzzy labels. It is based on the idea of overclustering to detect substructures in these fuzzy labels. We propose a novel loss to improve the overclustering capability of our framework and show the benefit of overclustering for fuzzy labels. We show that our framework is superior to previous state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods when applied to real-world plankton data with fuzzy labels. Moreover, we acquire 5 to 10\% more consistent predictions of substructures.

Vibration-based techniques are among the most common condition monitoring approaches. With the advancement of computers, these approaches have also been improved such that recently, these approaches in conjunction with deep learning methods attract attention among researchers. This is mostly due to the nature of the deep learning method that could facilitate the monitoring procedure by integrating the feature extraction, feature selection, and classification steps into one automated step. However, this can be achieved at the expense of challenges in designing the architecture of a deep learner, tuning its hyper-parameters. Moreover, it sometimes gives low generalization capability. As a remedy to these problems, this study proposes a framework based on ensemble deep learning methodology. The framework was initiated by creating a pool of Convolutional neural networks (CNN). To create diversity to the CNNs, they are fed by frequency responses which are passed through different functions. As the next step, proper CNNs are selected based on an information criterion to be used for fusion. The fusion is then carried out by improved Dempster-Shafer theory. The proposed framework is applied to real test data collected from Equiax Polycrystalline Nickel alloy first-stage turbine blades with complex geometry.

The required amount of labeled data is one of the biggest issues in deep learning. Semi-Supervised Learning can potentially solve this issue by using additional unlabeled data. However, many datasets suffer from variability in the annotations. The aggregated labels from these annotation are not consistent between different annotators and thus are considered fuzzy. These fuzzy labels are often not considered by Semi-Supervised Learning. This leads either to an inferior performance or to higher initial annotation costs in the complete machine learning development cycle. We envision the incorporation of fuzzy labels into Semi-Supervised Learning and give a proof-of-concept of the potential lower costs and higher consistency in the complete development cycle. As part of our concept, we discuss current limitations, futures research opportunities and potential broad impacts.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have recently demonstrated photo-realistic results for the task of novel view synthesis. In this paper, we propose to apply novel view synthesis to the robot relocalization problem: we demonstrate improvement of camera pose regression thanks to an additional synthetic dataset rendered by the NeRF class of algorithm. To avoid spawning novel views in irrelevant places we selected virtual camera locations from NeRF internal representation of the 3D geometry of the scene. We further improved localization accuracy of pose regressors using synthesized realistic and geometry consistent images as data augmentation during training. At the time of publication, our approach improved state of the art with a 60% lower error on Cambridge Landmarks and 7-scenes datasets. Hence, the resulting accuracy becomes comparable to structure-based methods, without any architecture modification or domain adaptation constraints. Since our method allows almost infinite generation of training data, we investigated limitations of camera pose regression depending on size and distribution of data used for training on public benchmarks. We concluded that pose regression accuracy is mostly bounded by relatively small and biased datasets rather than capacity of the pose regression model to solve the localization task.

The spinal cord (SC), which conveys information between the brain and the peripheral nervous system, plays a key role in various neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis (MS) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), in which both gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM) may be impaired. While automated methods for WM/GM segmentation are now largely available, these techniques, developed for conventional systems (3T or lower) do not necessarily perform well on 7T MRI data, which feature finer details, contrasts, but also different artifacts or signal dropout. The primary goal of this study is thus to propose a new deep learning model that allows robust SC/GM multi-class segmentation based on ultra-high resolution 7T T2*-w MR images. The second objective is to highlight the relevance of implementing a specific data augmentation (DA) strategy, in particular to generate a generic model that could be used for multi-center studies at 7T.

In this paper, we discuss the initial attempts at boosting understanding human language based on deep-learning models with quantum computing. We successfully train a quantum-enhanced Long Short-Term Memory network to perform the parts-of-speech tagging task via numerical simulations. Moreover, a quantum-enhanced Transformer is proposed to perform the sentiment analysis based on the existing dataset.