What would the inputs be to a machine whose output is the destabilization of a robust democracy, or whose emanations could disrupt the political power of nations? In the recent essay "The Coming AI Hackers," Schneier (2021) proposed a future application of artificial intelligences to discover, manipulate, and exploit vulnerabilities of social, economic, and political systems at speeds far greater than humans' ability to recognize and respond to such threats. This work advances the concept by applying to it theory from machine learning, hypothesizing some possible "featurization" (input specification and transformation) frameworks for AI hacking. Focusing on the political domain, we develop graph and sequence data representations that would enable the application of a range of deep learning models to predict attributes and outcomes of political systems. We explore possible data models, datasets, predictive tasks, and actionable applications associated with each framework. We speculate about the likely practical impact and feasibility of such models, and conclude by discussing their ethical implications.

Graphic design is ubiquitous in people's daily lives. For graphic design, the most time-consuming task is laying out various components in the interface. Repetitive manual layout design will waste a lot of time for professional graphic designers. Existing templates are usually rudimentary and not suitable for most designs, reducing efficiency and limiting creativity. This paper implemented the Transformer model and conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) to the graphic design layout generation task. It proposed an end-to-end graphic design layout generation model named LayoutT-CVAE. We also proposed element disentanglement and feature-based disentanglement strategies and introduce new graphic design principles and similarity metrics into the model, which significantly increased the controllability and interpretability of the deep model. Compared with the existing state-of-art models, the layout generated by ours performs better on many metrics.

Score-based diffusion models provide a powerful way to model images using the gradient of the data distribution. Leveraging the learned score function as a prior, here we introduce a way to sample data from a conditional distribution given the measurements, such that the model can be readily used for solving inverse problems in imaging, especially for accelerated MRI. In short, we train a continuous time-dependent score function with denoising score matching. Then, at the inference stage, we iterate between numerical SDE solver and data consistency projection step to achieve reconstruction. Our model requires magnitude images only for training, and yet is able to reconstruct complex-valued data, and even extends to parallel imaging. The proposed method is agnostic to sub-sampling patterns, and can be used with any sampling schemes. Also, due to its generative nature, our approach can quantify uncertainty, which is not possible with standard regression settings. On top of all the advantages, our method also has very strong performance, even beating the models trained with full supervision. With extensive experiments, we verify the superiority of our method in terms of quality and practicality.

Camera-based physiological measurement is a growing field with neural models providing state-the-art-performance. Prior research have explored various "endto-end" models; however these methods still require several preprocessing steps. These additional operations are often non-trivial to implement making replication and deployment difficult and can even have a higher computational budget than the "core" network itself. In this paper, we propose two novel and efficient neural models for camera-based physiological measurement called EfficientPhys that remove the need for face detection, segmentation, normalization, color space transformation or any other preprocessing steps. Using an input of raw video frames, our models achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on three public datasets. We show that this is the case whether using a transformer or convolutional backbone. We further evaluate the latency of the proposed networks and show that our most light weight network also achieves a 33% improvement in efficiency. Camera-based physiological measurement is a non-contact approach for capturing cardiac signals via light reflected from the body. The most common such signal is the blood volume pulse (BVP) measured via the photoplethysmogram (PPG). From this, heart rate (Takano & Ohta, 2007; Verkruysse et al., 2008), respiration rate (Poh et al., 2010) and pulse transit times Shao et al. (2014) can be derived.

To enable robots to instruct humans in collaborations, we identify several aspects of language processing that are not commonly studied in this context. These include location, planning, and generation. We suggest evaluations for each task, offer baselines for simple methods, and close by discussing challenges and opportunities in studying language for collaboration.

With significant advances in deep learning, many computer vision applications have reached the inflection point. However, these deep learning models need large amount of labeled data for model training and optimum parameter estimation. Limited labeled data for model training results in over-fitting and impacts their generalization performance. However, the collection and annotation of large amount of data is a very time consuming and expensive operation. Further, due to privacy and security concerns, the large amount of labeled data could not be collected for certain applications such as those involving medical field. Self-training, Co-training, and Self-ensemble methods are three types of semi-supervised learning methods that can be used to exploit unlabeled data. In this paper, we propose self-ensemble based deep learning model that along with limited labeled data, harness unlabeled data for improving the generalization performance. We evaluated the proposed self-ensemble based deep-learning model for soft-biometric gender and age classification. Experimental evaluation on CelebA and VISOB datasets suggest gender classification accuracy of 94.46% and 81.00%, respectively, using only 1000 labeled samples and remaining 199k samples as unlabeled samples for CelebA dataset and similarly,1000 labeled samples with remaining 107k samples as unlabeled samples for VISOB dataset. Comparative evaluation suggest that there is $5.74\%$ and $8.47\%$ improvement in the accuracy of the self-ensemble model when compared with supervised model trained on the entire CelebA and VISOB dataset, respectively. We also evaluated the proposed learning method for age-group prediction on Adience dataset and it outperformed the baseline supervised deep-learning learning model with a better exact accuracy of 55.55 $\pm$ 4.28 which is 3.92% more than the baseline.

Recently, there have been tremendous research outcomes in the fields of speech recognition and natural language processing. This is due to the well-developed multi-layers deep learning paradigms such as wav2vec2.0, Wav2vecU, WavBERT, and HuBERT that provide better representation learning and high information capturing. Such paradigms run on hundreds of unlabeled data, then fine-tuned on a small dataset for specific tasks. This paper introduces a deep learning constructed emotional recognition model for Arabic speech dialogues. The developed model employs the state of the art audio representations include wav2vec2.0 and HuBERT. The experiment and performance results of our model overcome the previous known outcomes.

Multilabel learning tackles the problem of associating a sample with multiple class labels. This work proposes a new ensemble method for managing multilabel classification: the core of the proposed approach combines a set of gated recurrent units and temporal convolutional neural networks trained with variants of the Adam optimization approach. Multiple Adam variants, including novel one proposed here, are compared and tested; these variants are based on the difference between present and past gradients, with step size adjusted for each parameter. The proposed neural network approach is also combined with Incorporating Multiple Clustering Centers (IMCC), which further boosts classification performance. Multiple experiments on nine data sets representing a wide variety of multilabel tasks demonstrate the robustness of our best ensemble, which is shown to outperform the state-of-the-art. The MATLAB code for generating the best ensembles in the experimental section will be available at https://github.com/LorisNanni.

Algorithmic bias is of increasing concern, both to the research community, and society at large. Bias in AI is more abstract and unintuitive than traditional forms of discrimination and can be more difficult to detect and mitigate. A clear gap exists in the current literature on evaluating the relative bias in the performance of multi-class classifiers. In this work, we propose two simple yet effective metrics, Combined Error Variance (CEV) and Symmetric Distance Error (SDE), to quantitatively evaluate the class-wise bias of two models in comparison to one another. By evaluating the performance of these new metrics and by demonstrating their practical application, we show that they can be used to measure fairness as well as bias. These demonstrations show that our metrics can address specific needs for measuring bias in multi-class classification. Broad acceptance of the large-scale deployment of AI and neural networks depends on the models' perceived trustworthiness and fairness. However, research on evaluating and mitigating bias for neural networks in general and compressed neural networks in particular is still in its infancy. Because deep neural networks (DNNs) are "black box" learners, it can be difficult to understand what correlations they have learned from their training data, and how that affects the downstream decisions that are made in the real world. Two models may appear to have very similar performance when only measured in terms of accuracy, precision, etc. but deeper analysis can show uneven performance across many classes.

In this work, we study the evolution of the loss Hessian across many classification tasks in order to understand the effect the curvature of the loss has on the training dynamics. Whereas prior work has focused on how different learning rates affect the loss Hessian observed during training, we also analyze the effects of model initialization, architectural choices, and common training heuristics such as gradient clipping and learning rate warmup. Our results demonstrate that successful model and hyperparameter choices allow the early optimization trajectory to either avoid -- or navigate out of -- regions of high curvature and into flatter regions that tolerate a higher learning rate. Our results suggest a unifying perspective on how disparate mitigation strategies for training instability ultimately address the same underlying failure mode of neural network optimization, namely poor conditioning. Inspired by the conditioning perspective, we show that learning rate warmup can improve training stability just as much as batch normalization, layer normalization, MetaInit, GradInit, and Fixup initialization.