front end
NeuroRadar: A Neuromorphic Radar Sensor for Low-Power IoT Systems
We introduce NeuroRadar, a novel low-power radar paradigm that realizes the concept of neuromorphic radar sensing. NeuroRadar incorporates a spike-generation radar sensor that directly interfaces with SNN-based neuromorphic processors, leading to superior energy efficiency. We devise a low-power, low-complexity radar front end based on the SIL principle. Both our theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that multi-chain SIL radar sensors can supply ample information for short-range, low-velocity sensing applications. We implement the neuromorphic radar system through a printed-circuit board (PCB) prototype and carry out simulations for the IC version. Our experiments verify NeuroRadar's ability to empower resource-constrained IoT devices to perform low-power smart sensing.
A Curious Case of Remarkable Resilience to Gradient Attacks via Fully Convolutional and Differentiable Front End with a Skip Connection
Boytsov, Leonid, Joshi, Ameya, Condessa, Filipe
We tested front-end enhanced neural models where a frozen classifier was prepended by a differentiable and fully convolutional model with a skip connection. By training them using a small learning rate for about one epoch, we obtained models that retained the accuracy of the backbone classifier while being unusually resistant to gradient attacks including APGD and FAB-T attacks from the AutoAttack package, which we attributed to gradient masking. The gradient masking phenomenon is not new, but the degree of masking was quite remarkable for fully differentiable models that did not have gradient-shattering components such as JPEG compression or components that are expected to cause diminishing gradients. Though black box attacks can be partially effective against gradient masking, they are easily defeated by combining models into randomized ensembles. We estimate that such ensembles achieve near-SOTA AutoAttack accuracy on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and ImageNet despite having virtually zero accuracy under adaptive attacks. Adversarial training of the backbone classifier can further increase resistance of the front-end enhanced model to gradient attacks. On CIFAR10, the respective randomized ensemble achieved 90.8$\pm 2.5$% (99% CI) accuracy under AutoAttack while having only 18.2$\pm 3.6$% accuracy under the adaptive attack. We do not establish SOTA in adversarial robustness. Instead, we make methodological contributions and further supports the thesis that adaptive attacks designed with the complete knowledge of model architecture are crucial in demonstrating model robustness and that even the so-called white-box gradient attacks can have limited applicability. Although gradient attacks can be complemented with black-box attack such as the SQUARE attack or the zero-order PGD, black-box attacks can be weak against randomized ensembles, e.g., when ensemble models mask gradients.
Clippy is back in a new, unauthorized Windows AI app
When Microsoft debuted its AI-powered Bing Chat, the obvious point of comparison was Clippy, the virtual assistant users loved and/or loathed in Microsoft Office 97. Now Clippy is back, in a new, unauthorized app that somehow has made it onto the Microsoft Store. Clippy by Firecube uses Microsoft's animated paper clip, Clippy (known as Clippit to purists), as a front end for ChatGPT 3.5, the AI chatbot developed by OpenAI. Although the app refers to Clippy by name, the full text description of the app immediately identifies it as "Not by Microsoft" to presumably fend off any lawyers that might be sniffing about the app. Firecube has a good reputation as a developer who looks deeply into new Windows code for unpublicized features.
DynPL-SVO: A Robust Stereo Visual Odometry for Dynamic Scenes
Zhang, Baosheng, Ma, Xiaoguang, Ma, Hongjun, Luo, Chunbo
Most feature-based stereo visual odometry (SVO) approaches estimate the motion of mobile robots by matching and tracking point features along a sequence of stereo images. However, in dynamic scenes mainly comprising moving pedestrians, vehicles, etc., there are insufficient robust static point features to enable accurate motion estimation, causing failures when reconstructing robotic motion. In this paper, we proposed DynPL-SVO, a complete dynamic SVO method that integrated united cost functions containing information between matched point features and re-projection errors perpendicular and parallel to the direction of the line features. Additionally, we introduced a \textit{dynamic} \textit{grid} algorithm to enhance its performance in dynamic scenes. The stereo camera motion was estimated through Levenberg-Marquard minimization of the re-projection errors of both point and line features. Comprehensive experimental results on KITTI and EuRoC MAV datasets showed that accuracy of the DynPL-SVO was improved by over 20\% on average compared to other state-of-the-art SVO systems, especially in dynamic scenes.
Content Adaptive Front End For Audio Signal Processing
We propose a learnable content adaptive front end for audio signal processing. Before the modern advent of deep learning, we used fixed representation non-learnable front-ends like spectrogram or mel-spectrogram with/without neural architectures. With convolutional architectures supporting various applications such as ASR and acoustic scene understanding, a shift to a learnable front ends occurred in which both the type of basis functions and the weight were learned from scratch and optimized for the particular task of interest. With the shift to transformer-based architectures with no convolutional blocks present, a linear layer projects small waveform patches onto a small latent dimension before feeding them to a transformer architecture. In this work, we propose a way of computing a content-adaptive learnable time-frequency representation. We pass each audio signal through a bank of convolutional filters, each giving a fixed-dimensional vector. It is akin to learning a bank of finite impulse-response filterbanks and passing the input signal through the optimum filter bank depending on the content of the input signal. A content-adaptive learnable time-frequency representation may be more broadly applicable, beyond the experiments in this paper.
Laterally Interconnected Self-Organizing Maps in Hand-Written Digit Recognition
An application of laterally interconnected self-organizing maps (LISSOM) to handwritten digit recognition is presented. The lat(cid:173) eral connections learn the correlations of activity between units on the map. The resulting excitatory connections focus the activity into local patches and the inhibitory connections decorrelate redun(cid:173) dant activity on the map. The map thus forms internal representa(cid:173) tions that are easy to recognize with e.g. a perceptron network. The recognition rate on a subset of NIST database 3 is 4.0% higher with LISSOM than with a regular Self-Organizing Map (SOM) as the front end, and 15.8% higher than recognition of raw input bitmaps directly.
Real Time Voice Processing with Audiovisual Feedback: Toward Autonomous Agents with Perfect Pitch
We have implemented a real time front end for detecting voiced speech and estimating its fundamental frequency. The front end performs the signal processing for voice-driven agents that attend to the pitch contours of human speech and provide continuous audiovisual feedback. The al- gorithm we use for pitch tracking has several distinguishing features: it makes no use of FFTs or autocorrelation at the pitch period; it updates the pitch incrementally on a sample-by-sample basis; it avoids peak picking and does not require interpolation in time or frequency to obtain high res- olution estimates; and it works reliably over a four octave range, in real time, without the need for postprocessing to produce smooth contours. The algorithm is based on two simple ideas in neural computation: the introduction of a purposeful nonlinearity, and the error signal of a least squares fit. The pitch tracker is used in two real time multimedia applica- tions: a voice-to-MIDI player that synthesizes electronic music from vo- calized melodies, and an audiovisual Karaoke machine with multimodal feedback.
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Evolution of SLAM: Toward the Robust-Perception of Autonomy
Simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) is the problem of autonomous robots to construct or update a map of an undetermined unstructured environment while simultaneously estimate the pose in it. The current trend towards self-driving vehicles has influenced the development of robust SLAM techniques over the last 30 years. This problem is addressed by using a standard sensor or a sensor array (Ultrasonic sensor, LIDAR, Camera, Kinect RGB-D) with sensor fusion techniques to achieve the perception step. Sensing method is determined by considering the specifications of the environment to extract the features. Then the usage of classical Filter-based approaches, the global optimisation approach which is a popular method for visual-based SLAM and convolutional neural network-based methods such as deep learning-based SLAM are discussed whereas considering how to overcome the localisation and mapping issues. The robustness and scalability in long-term autonomy, performance and other new directions in the algorithms compared with each other to sort out. This paper is looking at the published previous work with a judgemental perspective from sensors to algorithm development while discussing open challenges and new research frontiers.
Will CHATgpt make us more or less innovative?
The rapid emergence of increasingly sophisticated'AI ' programs such as CHATgpt will profoundly impact our world in many ways. That will inevitably include Innovation, especially the front end. But will it ultimately help or hurt us? Better access to information should be a huge benefit, and my intuition was to dive in and take full advantage. I still think it has enormous upside, but I also think it needs to be treated with care.