The task of image generation started to receive some attention from artists and designers to inspire them in new creations. However, exploiting the results of deep generative models such as Generative Adversarial Networks can be long and tedious given the lack of existing tools. In this work, we propose a simple strategy to inspire creators with new generations learned from a dataset of their choice, while providing some control on them. We design a simple optimization method to find the optimal latent parameters corresponding to the closest generation to any input inspirational image. Specifically, we allow the generation given an inspirational image of the user choice by performing several optimization steps to recover optimal parameters from the model's latent space. We tested several exploration methods starting with classic gradient descents to gradient-free optimizers. Many gradient-free optimizers just need comparisons (better/worse than another image), so that they can even be used without numerical criterion, without inspirational image, but with only with human preference. Thus, by iterating on one's preferences we could make robust Facial Composite or Fashion Generation algorithms. High resolution of the produced design generations are obtained using progressive growing of GANs. Our results on four datasets of faces, fashion images, and textures show that satisfactory images are effectively retrieved in most cases.

Multi-hop question answering requires a model to connect multiple pieces of evidence scattered in a long context to answer the question. In this paper, we show that in the multi-hop HotpotQA (Yang et al., 2018) dataset, the examples often contain reasoning shortcuts through which models can directly locate the answer by word-matching the question with a sentence in the context. We demonstrate this issue by constructing adversarial documents that create contradicting answers to the shortcut but do not affect the validity of the original answer. The performance of strong baseline models drops significantly on our adversarial evaluation, indicating that they are indeed exploiting the shortcuts rather than performing multi-hop reasoning. After adversarial training, the baseline's performance improves but is still limited on the adversarial evaluation. Hence, we use a control unit that dynamically attends to the question at different reasoning hops to guide the model's multi-hop reasoning. We show that this 2-hop model trained on the regular data is more robust to the adversaries than the baseline model. After adversarial training, this 2-hop model not only achieves improvements over its counterpart trained on regular data, but also outperforms the adversarially-trained 1-hop baseline. We hope that these insights and initial improvements will motivate the development of new models that combine explicit compositional reasoning with adversarial training.

We establish a theoretical link between adversarial training and operator norm regularization for deep neural networks. Specifically, we show that adversarial training is a data-dependent generalization of spectral norm regularization. This intriguing connection provides fundamental insights into the origin of adversarial vulnerability and hints at novel ways to robustify and defend against adversarial attacks. We provide extensive empirical evidence to support our theoretical results.

We implement a differentiable Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method inspired by FBNet for discovering neural networks that are heavily optimized for a particular target device. The FBNet NAS method discovers a neural network from a given search space by optimizing over a loss function which accounts for accuracy and target device latency. We extend this loss function by adding an energy term. This will potentially enhance the ``hardware awareness" and help us find a neural network architecture that is optimal in terms of accuracy, latency and energy consumption, given a target device (Raspberry Pi in our case). We name our trained child architecture obtained at the end of search process as Hardware Aware Neural Network Architecture (HANNA). We prove the efficacy of our approach by benchmarking HANNA against two other state-of-the-art neural networks designed for mobile/embedded applications, namely MobileNetv2 and CondenseNet for CIFAR-10 dataset. Our results show that HANNA provides a speedup of about 2.5x and 1.7x, and reduces energy consumption by 3.8x and 2x compared to MobileNetv2 and CondenseNet respectively. HANNA is able to provide such significant speedup and energy efficiency benefits over the state-of-the-art baselines at the cost of a tolerable 4-5% drop in accuracy.

We present a technique to improve the transferability of deep representations learned on small labeled datasets by introducing self-supervised tasks as auxiliary loss functions. While recent approaches for self-supervised learning have shown the benefits of training on large unlabeled datasets, we find improvements in generalization even on small datasets and when combined with strong supervision. Learning representations with self-supervised losses reduces the relative error rate of a state-of-the-art meta-learner by 5-25% on several few-shot learning benchmarks, as well as off-the-shelf deep networks on standard classification tasks when training from scratch. We find the benefits of self-supervision increase with the difficulty of the task. Our approach utilizes the images within the dataset to construct self-supervised losses and hence is an effective way of learning transferable representations without relying on any external training data.

Most state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) classification systems are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. As a consequence, adversarial robustness poses a significant challenge for the deployment of ML-based systems in safety- and security-critical environments like autonomous driving, disease detection or unmanned aerial vehicles. In the past years we have seen an impressive amount of publications presenting more and more new adversarial attacks. However, the attack research seems to be rather unstructured and new attacks often appear to be random selections from the unlimited set of possible adversarial attacks. With this publication, we present a structured analysis of the adversarial attack creation process. By detecting different building blocks of adversarial attacks, we outline the road to new sets of adversarial attacks. We call this the "attack generator". In the pursuit of this objective, we summarize and extend existing adversarial perturbation taxonomies. The resulting taxonomy is then linked to the application context of computer vision systems for autonomous vehicles, i.e. semantic segmentation and object detection. Finally, in order to prove the usefulness of the attack generator, we investigate existing semantic segmentation attacks with respect to the detected defining components of adversarial attacks.

De-identification of clinical records is an extremely important process which enables the use of the wealth of information present in them. There are a lot of techniques available for this but none of the method implementation has evaluated the scalability, which is an important benchmark. We evaluated numerous deep learning techniques such as BiLSTM-CNN, IDCNN, CRF, BiLSTM-CRF, SpaCy, etc. on both the performance and efficiency. We propose that the SpaCy model implementation for scrubbing sensitive PHI data from medical records is both well performing and extremely efficient compared to other published models.

Solving systems of linear equations is a problem occuring frequently in water engineering applications. Usually the size of the problem is too large to be solved via direct factorization. One can resort to iterative approaches, in particular the conjugate gradients method if the matrix is symmetric positive definite. Preconditioners further enhance the rate of convergence but hitherto only handcrafted ones requiring expert knowledge have been used. We propose an innovative approach employing Machine Learning, in particular a Convolutional Neural Network, to unassistedly design preconditioning matrices specifically for the problem at hand. Based on an in-depth case study in fluid simulation we are able to show that our learned preconditioner is able to improve the convergence rate even beyond well established methods like incomplete Cholesky factorization or Algebraic MultiGrid.

We consider the black-box adversarial setting, where the adversary has to generate adversarial perturbations without access to the target models to compute gradients. Previous methods tried to approximate the gradient either by using a transfer gradient of a surrogate white-box model, or based on the query feedback. However, these methods often suffer from low attack success rates or poor query efficiency since it is non-trivial to estimate the gradient in a high-dimensional space with limited information. To address these problems, we propose a prior-guided random gradient-free (P-RGF) method to improve black-box adversarial attacks, which takes the advantage of a transfer-based prior and the query information simultaneously. The transfer-based prior given by the gradient of a surrogate model is appropriately integrated into our algorithm by an optimal coefficient derived by a theoretical analysis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method requires much fewer queries to attack black-box models with higher success rates compared with the alternative state-of-the-art methods.

Flow-based deep generative models learn data distributions by transforming a simple base distribution into a complex distribution via a set of invertible transformations. Due to the invertibility, such models can score unseen data samples by computing their exact likelihood under the learned distribution. This makes flow-based models a perfect tool for novelty detection, an anomaly detection technique where unseen data samples are classified as normal or abnormal by scoring them against a learned model of normal data. We show that normalizing flows can be used as novelty detectors in time series. Two flow-based models, Masked Autoregressive Flows and Free-form Jacobian of Reversible Dynamics restricted by autoregressive MADE networks, are tested on synthetic data and motor current data from an industrial machine and achieve good results, outperforming a conventional novelty detection method, the Local Outlier Factor.