-- With a growing number of robots being deployed across diverse applications, robust multimodal anomaly detection becomes increasingly important. In robotic manipulation, failures typically arise from (1) robot-driven anomalies due to an insufficient task model or hardware limitations, and (2) environment-driven anomalies caused by dynamic environmental changes or external interferences. Conventional anomaly detection methods focus either on the first by low-level statistical modeling of proprioceptive signals or the second by deep learning-based visual environment observation, each with different computational and training data requirements. T o effectively capture anomalies from both sources, we propose a mixture-of-experts framework that integrates the complementary detection mechanisms with a visual-language model for environment monitoring and a Gaussian-mixture regression-based detector for tracking deviations in interaction forces and robot motions. We introduce a confidence-based fusion mechanism that dynamically selects the most reliable detector for each situation. We evaluate our approach on both household and industrial tasks using two robotic systems, demonstrating a 60% reduction in detection delay while improving frame-wise anomaly detection performance compared to individual detectors. As collaborative robots act increasingly autonomously across various applications, accurately monitoring task progress and success becomes crucial. In both household and industrial settings, like the ones depicted in Figure 1, autonomous robots are confronted with a range of unknown situations, leading to diverse sources of task failure.

We propose a novel approach to effectively detect cloned identities of social-sensor cloud service providers (i.e. social media users) in the face of incomplete non-privacy-sensitive profile data. Named ICD-IPD, the proposed approach first extracts account pairs with similar usernames or screen names from a given set of user accounts collected from a social media. It then learns a multi-view representation associated with a given account and extracts two categories of features for every single account. These two categories of features include profile and Weighted Generalised Canonical Correlation Analysis (WGCCA)-based features that may potentially contain missing values. To counter the impact of such missing values, a missing value imputer will next impute the missing values of the aforementioned profile and WGCCA-based features. After that, the proposed approach further extracts two categories of augmented features for each account pair identified previously, namely, 1) similarity and 2) differences-based features. Finally, these features are concatenated and fed into a Light Gradient Boosting Machine classifier to detect identity cloning. We evaluated and compared the proposed approach against the existing state-of-the-art identity cloning approaches and other machine or deep learning models atop a real-world dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and models in terms of Precision, Recall and F1-score.

The Industry 5.0 paradigm focuses on industrial operator well-being and sustainable manufacturing practices, where humans play a central role, not only during the repetitive and collaborative tasks of the manufacturing process, but also in the management of the factory floor assets. Human factors, such as ergonomics, safety, and well-being, push the human-centric smart factory to efficiently adopt novel technologies while minimizing environmental and social impact. As operations at the factory floor increasingly rely on collaborative robots (CoBots) and flexible manufacturing systems, there is a growing demand for redundant safety mechanisms (i.e., automatic human detection in the proximity of machinery that is under operation). Fostering enhanced process safety for human proximity detection allows for the protection against possible incidents or accidents with the deployed industrial devices and machinery. This paper introduces the design and implementation of a cost-effective thermal imaging Safety Sensor that can be used in the scope of Industry 5.0 to trigger distinct safe mode states in manufacturing processes that rely on collaborative robotics. The proposed Safety Sensor uses a hybrid detection approach and has been evaluated under controlled environmental conditions. The obtained results show a 97% accuracy at low computational cost when using the developed hybrid method to detect the presence of humans in thermal images.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great performance across various benchmarks, showing potential as general-purpose task solvers. However, as LLMs are typically trained on vast amounts of data, a significant concern in their evaluation is data contamination, where overlap between training data and evaluation datasets inflates performance assessments. While multiple approaches have been developed to identify data contamination, these approaches rely on specific assumptions that may not hold universally across different settings. To bridge this gap, we systematically review 47 papers on data contamination detection, categorize the underlying assumptions, and assess whether they have been rigorously validated. We identify and analyze eight categories of assumptions and test three of them as case studies. Our analysis reveals that when classifying instances used for pretraining LLMs, detection approaches based on these three assumptions perform close to random guessing, suggesting that current LLMs learn data distributions rather than memorizing individual instances. Overall, this work underscores the importance of approaches clearly stating their underlying assumptions and testing their validity across various scenarios.

Real-time lightweight time series anomaly detection has become increasingly crucial in cybersecurity and many other domains. Its ability to adapt to unforeseen pattern changes and swiftly identify anomalies enables prompt responses and critical decision-making. While several such anomaly detection approaches have been introduced in recent works years, they primarily utilize a single type of recurrent neural net (RNNs) and have been implemented in only one deep learning framework. It is unclear how the use of different types of RNNs available in various deep learning frameworks affects the performance of these anomaly detection approaches due to the absence of comprehensive evaluations. Arbitrarily choosing a RNN variant and a deep learning framework to implement an anomaly detection approach may not reflect its true performance and could potentially mislead users into favoring one approach over another. In this paper, we aim to study the influence of various types of RNNs available in popular deep learning frameworks on real-time lightweight time series anomaly detection. We reviewed several state-of-the-art approaches and implemented a representative anomaly detection approach using well-known RNN variants supported by three widely recognized deep learning frameworks. A comprehensive evaluation is then conducted to analyze the performance of each implementation across real-world, open-source time series datasets. The evaluation results provide valuable guidance for selecting the appropriate RNN variant and deep learning framework for real-time, lightweight time series anomaly detection.

A robot performing multi-object grasping needs to sense the number of objects in the hand after grasping. The count plays an important role in determining the robot's next move and the outcome and efficiency of the whole pick-place process. This paper presents a data-driven contrastive learning-based counting classifier with a modified loss function as a simple and effective approach for object counting despite significant occlusion challenges caused by robotic fingers and objects. The model was validated against other models with three different common shapes (spheres, cylinders, and cubes) in simulation and in a real setup. The proposed contrastive learning-based counting approach achieved above 96\% accuracy for all three objects in the real setup.

Deepfake detection automatically recognizes the manipulated medias through the analysis of the difference between manipulated and non-altered videos. It is natural to ask which are the top performers among the existing deepfake detection approaches to identify promising research directions and provide practical guidance. Unfortunately, it's difficult to conduct a sound benchmarking comparison of existing detection approaches using the results in the literature because evaluation conditions are inconsistent across studies. Our objective is to establish a comprehensive and consistent benchmark, to develop a repeatable evaluation procedure, and to measure the performance of a range of detection approaches so that the results can be compared soundly. A challenging dataset consisting of the manipulated samples generated by more than 13 different methods has been collected, and 11 popular detection approaches (9 algorithms) from the existing literature have been implemented and evaluated with 6 fair-minded and practical evaluation metrics. Finally, 92 models have been trained and 644 experiments have been performed for the evaluation. The results along with the shared data and evaluation methodology constitute a benchmark for comparing deepfake detection approaches and measuring progress.

The advent of instruction-tuned language models that convincingly mimic human writing poses a significant risk of abuse. For example, such models could be used for plagiarism, disinformation, spam, or phishing. However, such abuse may be counteracted with the ability to detect whether a piece of text was composed by a language model rather than a human. Some previous approaches to this problem have relied on supervised methods trained on corpora of confirmed human and machine-written documents. Unfortunately, model under-specification poses an unavoidable challenge for neural network-based detectors, making them brittle in the face of data shifts, such as the release of further language models producing still more fluent text than the models used to train the detectors. Other previous approaches require access to the models that may have generated a document in question at inference or detection time, which is often impractical. In light of these challenges, we pursue a fundamentally different approach not relying on samples from language models of concern at training time. Instead, we propose to leverage representations of writing style estimated from human-authored text. Indeed, we find that features effective at distinguishing among human authors are also effective at distinguishing human from machine authors, including state of the art large language models like Llama 2, ChatGPT, and GPT-4. Furthermore, given a handful of examples composed by each of several specific language models of interest, our approach affords the ability to predict which model generated a given document.

Major advancements in computer vision can primarily be attributed to the use of labeled datasets. However, acquiring labels for datasets often results in errors which can harm model performance. Recent works have proposed methods to automatically identify mislabeled images, but developing strategies to effectively implement them in real world datasets has been sparsely explored. Towards improved data-centric methods for cleaning real world vision datasets, we first conduct more than 200 experiments carefully benchmarking recently developed automated mislabel detection methods on multiple datasets under a variety of synthetic and real noise settings with varying noise levels. We compare these methods to a Simple and Efficient Mislabel Detector (SEMD) that we craft, and find that SEMD performs similarly to or outperforms prior mislabel detection approaches. We then apply SEMD to multiple real world computer vision datasets and test how dataset size, mislabel removal strategy, and mislabel removal amount further affect model performance after retraining on the cleaned data. With careful design of the approach, we find that mislabel removal leads per-class performance improvements of up to 8% of a retrained classifier in smaller data regimes.

A multivariate time series refers to observations of two or more variables taken from a device or a system simultaneously over time. There is an increasing need to monitor multivariate time series and detect anomalies in real time to ensure proper system operation and good service quality. It is also highly desirable to have a lightweight anomaly detection system that considers correlations between different variables, adapts to changes in the pattern of the multivariate time series, offers immediate responses, and provides supportive information regarding detection results based on unsupervised learning and online model training. In the past decade, many multivariate time series anomaly detection approaches have been introduced. However, they are unable to offer all the above-mentioned features. In this paper, we propose RoLA, a real-time online lightweight anomaly detection system for multivariate time series based on a divide-and-conquer strategy, parallel processing, and the majority rule. RoLA employs multiple lightweight anomaly detectors to monitor multivariate time series in parallel, determine the correlations between variables dynamically on the fly, and then jointly detect anomalies based on the majority rule in real time. To demonstrate the performance of RoLA, we conducted an experiment based on a public dataset provided by the FerryBox of the One Ocean Expedition. The results show that RoLA provides satisfactory detection accuracy and lightweight performance.