We tackle the task of environmental event classification by drawing inspiration from the transformer neural network architecture used in machine translation. We modify this attention-based feedforward structure in such a way that allows the resulting model to use audio as well as video to compute sound event predictions. We perform extensive experiments with these adapted transformers on an audiovisual data set, obtained by appending relevant visual information to an existing large-scale weakly labeled audio collection. The employed multi-label data contains clip-level annotation indicating the presence or absence of 17 classes of environmental sounds, and does not include temporal information. We show that the proposed modified transformers strongly improve upon previously introduced models and in fact achieve state-of-the-art results. We also make a compelling case for devoting more attention to research in multimodal audiovisual classification by proving the usefulness of visual information for the task at hand,namely audio event recognition. In addition, we visualize internal attention patterns of the audiovisual transformers and in doing so demonstrate their potential for performing multimodal synchronization.

We propose a flexible framework that deals with both singer conversion and singers vocal technique conversion. The proposed model is trained on non-parallel corpora, accommodates many-to-many conversion, and leverages recent advances of variational autoencoders. It employs separate encoders to learn disentangled latent representations of singer identity and vocal technique separately, with a joint decoder for reconstruction. Conversion is carried out by simple vector arithmetic in the learned latent spaces. Both a quantitative analysis as well as a visualization of the converted spectrograms show that our model is able to disentangle singer identity and vocal technique and successfully perform conversion of these attributes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to jointly tackle conversion of singer identity and vocal technique based on a deep learning approach.

This work develops rigorous theoretical basis for the fact that deep Bayesian neural network (BNN) is an effective tool for high-dimensional variable selection with rigorous uncertainty quantification. We develop new Bayesian non-parametric theorems to show that a properly configured deep BNN (1) learns the variable importance effectively in high dimensions, and its learning rate can sometimes "break" the curse of dimensionality. (2) BNN's uncertainty quantification for variable importance is rigorous, in the sense that its 95% credible intervals for variable importance indeed covers the truth 95% of the time (i.e., the Bernstein-von Mises (BvM) phenomenon). The theoretical results suggest a simple variable selection algorithm based on the BNN's credible intervals. Extensive simulation confirms the theoretical findings and shows that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing classic and neural-network-based variable selection methods, particularly in high dimensions.

In safety-critical applications of machine learning, it is often necessary to look beyond standard metrics such as test accuracy in order to validate various qualitative properties such as monotonicity with respect to a feature or combination of features, checking for undesirable changes or oscillations in the response, and differences in outcomes (e.g. discrimination) for a protected class. To help answer this need, we propose a framework for approximately validating (or invalidating) various properties of a black box model by finding a univariate diagnostic curve in the input space whose output maximally violates a given property. These diagnostic curves show the exact value of the model along the curve and can be displayed with a simple and intuitive line graph. We demonstrate the usefulness of these diagnostic curves across multiple use-cases and datasets including selecting between two models and understanding out-of-sample behavior.

Learning with kernels is an often resorted tool in modern machine learning. Standard approaches for this type of learning use a predefined kernel that requires careful selection of hyperparameters. To mitigate this burden, we propose in this paper a framework to construct and learn a data-dependent kernel based on random features and implicit spectral distributions (Fourier transform of the kernel) parameterized by deep neural networks. We call the constructed network {\em KernelNet}, and apply it for deep generative modeling in various scenarios, including variants of the MMD-GAN and an implicit Variational Autoencoder (VAE), the two popular learning paradigms in deep generative models. Extensive experiments show the advantages of the proposed KernelNet, consistently achieving better performance compared to related methods.

We propose a method that enables practitioners to conveniently incorporate custom non-decomposable performance metrics into differentiable learning pipelines, notably those based upon deep learning architectures. Our approach is based on the recently-developed adversarial prediction framework, a distributionally robust approach that optimizes a metric in the worst case given the statistical summary of the empirical distribution. We formulate a marginal distribution technique to reduce the complexity of optimizing the adversarial prediction formulation over a vast range of non-decomposable metrics. We demonstrate how easy it is to write and incorporate complex custom metrics using our provided tool. Finally, we show the effectiveness of our approach for image classification tasks using MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets as well as classification task on tabular data using UCI repository and benchmark datasets.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are widely being adopted for safety-critical applications, e.g., healthcare and autonomous driving. Inherently, they are considered to be highly error-tolerant. However, recent studies have shown that hardware faults that impact the parameters of a DNN (e.g., weights) can have drastic impacts on its classification accuracy. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive error resilience analysis of DNNs subjected to hardware faults (e.g., permanent faults) in the weight memory. The outcome of this analysis is leveraged to propose a novel error mitigation technique which squashes the high-intensity faulty activation values to alleviate their impact. We achieve this by replacing the unbounded activation functions with their clipped versions. We also present a method to systematically define the clipping values of the activation functions that result in increased resilience of the networks against faults. We evaluate our technique on the AlexNet and the VGG-16 DNNs trained for the CIFAR-10 dataset. The experimental results show that our mitigation technique significantly improves the resilience of the DNNs to faults. For example, the proposed technique offers on average 68.92% improvement in the classification accuracy of resilience-optimized VGG-16 model at 1e-5 fault rate, when compared to the base network without any fault mitigation.

--In Machine Learning as a Service, a provider trains a deep neural network and provides many users access to it. However, the hosted (source) model is susceptible to model stealing attacks where an adversary derives a surrogate model from API access to the source model. For post hoc detection of such attacks, the provider needs a robust method to determine whether a suspect model is a surrogate of their model or not. We propose a fingerprinting method for deep neural networks that extracts a set of inputs from the source model so that only surrogates agree with the source model on the classification of such inputs. These inputs are a specifically crafted subclass of targeted transferable adversarial examples which we call conferrable adversarial examples that transfer exclusively from a source model to its surrogates. We propose new methods to generate these conferrable adversarial examples and use them as our fingerprint. Our fingerprint is the first to be successfully tested as robust against distillation attacks, and our experiments show that this robustness extends to robustness against weaker removal attacks such as fine-tuning, ensemble attacks, and adversarial retraining. We even protect against a powerful adversary with white-box access to the source model, whereas the defender only needs black-box access to the surrogate model. We conduct our experiments on the CINIC dataset and a subset of ImageNet32 with 100 classes. I NTRODUCTION Deep neural networks (DNN) are powerful classifiers deployed for a wide range of tasks, e.g., image segmentation [1], in autonomous vehicles [2], natural language processing [3] and health care predictions [4]. Developing a DNN for a specific task is costly because of the labor and computational resources required for data collection, data cleaning, and training of the model. For this reason, models are often provided by a single entity and consumed by many, for example, in the context of Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS). A threat to the provider is model stealing, in which an adversary derives a surrogate model from access to a source model, but without access to data with ground truth labels. In this paper we study linkability of DNN models. A link is a relation between a target model and a source model. A target model is linked to a source model, if the target model is derived from the source model. Methods of derivation include, but are not limited to, distillation [5], fine-tuning [6], adversarial training [7] and model extraction [8].

Bayesian interpretations of neural network have a long history, dating back to early work in the 1990's and have recently regained attention because of their desirable properties like uncertainty estimation, model robustness and regularisation. We want to discuss here the application of Bayesian models to knowledge sharing between neural networks. Knowledge sharing comes in different facets, such as transfer learning, model distillation and shared embeddings. All of these tasks have in common that learned "features" ought to be shared across different networks. Theoretically rooted in the concepts of Bayesian neural networks this work has widespread application to general deep learning.

Constructing accurate and automatic solvers of math word problems has proven to be quite challenging. Prior attempts using machine learning have been trained on corpora specific to math word problems to produce arithmetic expressions in infix notation before answer computation. We find that custom-built neural networks have struggled to generalize well. This paper outlines the use of Transformer networks trained to translate math word problems to equivalent arithmetic expressions in infix, prefix, and postfix notations. In addition to training directly on domain-specific corpora, we use an approach that pre-trains on a general text corpus to provide foundational language abilities to explore if it improves performance. We compare results produced by a large number of neural configurations and find that most configurations outperform previously reported approaches on three of four datasets with significant increases in accuracy of over 20 percentage points. The best neural approaches boost accuracy by almost 10% on average when compared to the previous state of the art.