The basis of deepfakes, or image animation in general, is to combine the appearance extracted from a source image with motion patterns derived from a driving video. For these purposes deepfakes use deep learning, where their name comes from (deep learning fake). To be more precise, they are created using the combination of autoencoders and GANs. Autoencoder is a simple neural network, that utilizes unsupervised learning (or self-supervised if we want to be more accurate). They are called like that because they automatically encode information and usually are used for dimensionality reduction.

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Talking about racism and it's impact on robotics and roboticists was the first conversation in our new biweekly online discussion series "Society, Robots and Us" on alternate Tuesdays at 6pm PDT. It was a generous, honest and painful discussion that I hope has left a lasting impact on everyone who listened. There is systemic racism in America, and this does have an impact on robotics and roboticists in many many ways. The US Senator Elizabeth Warren in conversation today with Alicia Garza from Black Futures Lab said, "America was founded on principles of liberty and freedom, but it was built on the backs of enslaved people. This is a truth we must not ignore. Racism and white supremacy have shaped every crucial aspect of our economy, and our political system for generations now."

Most deep learning frameworks require users to pool their local data or model updates to a trusted server to train or maintain a global model. The assumption of a trusted server who has access to user information is ill-suited in many applications. To tackle this problem, we develop a new deep learning framework under an untrusted server setting, which includes three modules: (1) embedding module, (2) randomization module, and (3) classifier module. For the randomization module, we propose a novel local differentially private (LDP) protocol to reduce the impact of privacy parameter $\epsilon$ on accuracy, and provide enhanced flexibility in choosing randomization probabilities for LDP. Analysis and experiments show that our framework delivers comparable or even better performance than the non-private framework and existing LDP protocols, demonstrating the advantages of our LDP protocol.

Training a spoken language understanding system, as the one in Alexa, typically requires a large human-annotated corpus of data. Manual annotations are expensive and time consuming. In Alexa Skill Kit (ASK) user experience with the skill greatly depends on the amount of data provided by skill developer. In this work, we present an automatic natural language generation system, capable of generating both human-like interactions and annotations by the means of paraphrasing. Our approach consists of machine translation (MT) inspired encoder-decoder deep recurrent neural network. We evaluate our model on the impact it has on ASK skill, intent, named entity classification accuracy and sentence level coverage, all of which demonstrate significant improvements for unseen skills on natural language understanding (NLU) models, trained on the data augmented with paraphrases.

Deep learning (DL) techniques have gained significant popularity among software engineering (SE) researchers in recent years. This is because they can often solve many SE challenges without enormous manual feature engineering effort and complex domain knowledge. Although many DL studies have reported substantial advantages over other state-of-the-art models on effectiveness, they often ignore two factors: (1) replicability - whether the reported experimental result can be approximately reproduced in high probability with the same DL model and the same data; and (2) reproducibility - whether one reported experimental findings can be reproduced by new experiments with the same experimental protocol and DL model, but different sampled real-world data. Unlike traditional machine learning (ML) models, DL studies commonly overlook these two factors and declare them as minor threats or leave them for future work. This is mainly due to high model complexity with many manually set parameters and the time-consuming optimization process. In this study, we conducted a literature review on 93 DL studies recently published in twenty SE journals or conferences. Our statistics show the urgency of investigating these two factors in SE. Moreover, we re-ran four representative DL models in SE. Experimental results show the importance of replicability and reproducibility, where the reported performance of a DL model could not be replicated for an unstable optimization process. Reproducibility could be substantially compromised if the model training is not convergent, or if performance is sensitive to the size of vocabulary and testing data. It is therefore urgent for the SE community to provide a long-lasting link to a replication package, enhance DL-based solution stability and convergence, and avoid performance sensitivity on different sampled data.

These past few months have been especially challenging, and the deployment of technology in ways hitherto untested at an unrivalled pace has left the internet and technology watchers aghast. Artificial intelligence has become the byword for technological progress and is being used in everything from helping us combat the COVID-19 pandemic to nudging our attention in different directions as we all spend increasingly larger amounts of time online. It has never been more important that we keep a sharp eye out on the development of this field and how it is shaping our society and interactions with each other. With this inaugural edition of the State of AI Ethics we hope to bring forward the most important developments that caught our attention at the Montreal AI Ethics Institute this past quarter. Our goal is to help you navigate this ever-evolving field swiftly and allow you and your organization to make informed decisions. This pulse-check for the state of discourse, research, and development is geared towards researchers and practitioners alike who are making decisions on behalf of their organizations in considering the societal impacts of AI-enabled solutions. We cover a wide set of areas in this report spanning Agency and Responsibility, Security and Risk, Disinformation, Jobs and Labor, the Future of AI Ethics, and more. Our staff has worked tirelessly over the past quarter surfacing signal from the noise so that you are equipped with the right tools and knowledge to confidently tread this complex yet consequential domain.

In previous studies, decoding electroencephalography (EEG) signals has not considered the topological relationship of EEG electrodes. However, the latest neuroscience has suggested brain network connectivity. Thus, the exhibited interaction between EEG channels might not be appropriately measured via Euclidean distance. To fill the gap, an attention-based graph residual network, a novel structure of Graph Convolutional Neural Network (GCN), was presented to detect human motor intents from raw EEG signals, where the topological structure of EEG electrodes was built as a graph. Meanwhile, deep residual learning with a full-attention architecture was introduced to address the degradation problem concerning deeper networks in raw EEG motor imagery (MI) data. Individual variability, the critical and longstanding challenge underlying EEG signals, has been successfully handled with the state-of-the-art performance, 98.08% accuracy at the subject level, 94.28% for 20 subjects. Numerical results were promising that the implementation of the graph-structured topology was superior to decode raw EEG data. The innovative deep learning approach was expected to entail a universal method towards both neuroscience research and real-world EEG-based practical applications, e.g., seizure prediction.

A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to interact directly with raw data and acquire rich, general-purpose conceptual representations. In machine learning, symbolic models can capture the compositional and causal knowledge that enables flexible generalization, but they struggle to learn from raw inputs, relying on strong abstractions and simplifying assumptions. Neural network models can learn directly from raw data, but they struggle to capture compositional and causal structure and typically must retrain to tackle new tasks. To help bridge this gap, we propose Generative Neuro-Symbolic (GNS) Modeling, a framework for learning task-general representations by combining the structure of symbolic models with the expressivity of neural networks. Concepts and conceptual background knowledge are represented as probabilistic programs with neural network sub-routines, maintaining explicit causal and compositional structure while capturing nonparametric relationships and learning directly from raw data. We apply GNS to the Omniglot challenge of learning simple visual concepts at a human level. We report competitive results on 4 unique tasks including one-shot classification, parsing, generating new exemplars, and generating new concepts. To our knowledge, this is the strongest neurally-grounded model to complete a diverse set of Omniglot tasks.

Recent works demonstrate the texture bias in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), conflicting with early works claiming that networks identify objects using shape. It is commonly believed that the cost function forces the network to take a greedy route to increase accuracy using texture, failing to explore any global statistics. We propose a novel intuitive architecture, namely CognitiveCNN, inspired from feature integration theory in psychology to utilise human-interpretable feature like shape, texture, edges etc. to reconstruct, and classify the image. We define two metrics, namely TIC and RIC to quantify the importance of each stream using attention maps. We introduce a regulariser which ensures that the contribution of each feature is same for any task, as it is for reconstruction; and perform experiments to show the resulting boost in accuracy and robustness besides imparting explainability. Lastly, we adapt these ideas to conventional CNNs and propose Augmented Cognitive CNN to achieve superior performance in object recognition.