Interpreting Hidden Semantics in the Intermediate Layers of 3D Point Cloud Classification Neural Network

Although 3D point cloud classification neural network models have been widely used, the in-depth interpretation of the activation of the neurons and layers is still a challenge. We propose a novel approach, named Relevance Flow, to interpret the hidden semantics of 3D point cloud classification neural networks. It delivers the class Relevance to the activated neurons in the intermediate layers in a back-propagation manner, and associates the activation of neurons with the input points to visualize the hidden semantics of each layer. Specially, we reveal that the 3D point cloud classification neural network has learned the plane-level and part-level hidden semantics in the intermediate layers, and utilize the normal and IoU to evaluate the consistency of both levels' hidden semantics. Besides, by using the hidden semantics, we generate the adversarial attack samples to attack 3D point cloud classifiers. Experiments show that our proposed method reveals the hidden semantics of the 3D point cloud classification neural network on ModelNet40 and ShapeNet, which can be used for the unsupervised point cloud part segmentation without labels and attacking the 3D point cloud classifiers.

Adaptive Local Adversarial Attacks on 3D Point Clouds for Augmented Reality

As the key technology of augmented reality (AR), 3D recognition and tracking are always vulnerable to adversarial examples, which will cause serious security risks to AR systems. Adversarial examples are beneficial to improve the robustness of the 3D neural network model and enhance the stability of the AR system. At present, most 3D adversarial attack methods perturb the entire point cloud to generate adversarial examples, which results in high perturbation costs and difficulty in reconstructing the corresponding real objects in the physical world. In this paper, we propose an adaptive local adversarial attack method (AL-Adv) on 3D point clouds to generate adversarial point clouds. First, we analyze the vulnerability of the 3D network model and extract the salient regions of the input point cloud, namely the vulnerable regions. Second, we propose an adaptive gradient attack algorithm that targets vulnerable regions. The proposed attack algorithm adaptively assigns different disturbances in different directions of the three-dimensional coordinates of the point cloud. Experimental results show that our proposed method AL-Adv achieves a higher attack success rate than the global attack method. Specifically, the adversarial examples generated by the AL-Adv demonstrate good imperceptibility and small generation costs.

Virtual Sparse Convolution for Multimodal 3D Object Detection

Recently, virtual/pseudo-point-based 3D object detection that seamlessly fuses RGB images and LiDAR data by depth completion has gained great attention. However, virtual points generated from an image are very dense, introducing a huge amount of redundant computation during detection. Meanwhile, noises brought by inaccurate depth completion significantly degrade detection precision. This paper proposes a fast yet effective backbone, termed VirConvNet, based on a new operator VirConv (Virtual Sparse Convolution), for virtual-point-based 3D object detection. VirConv consists of two key designs: (1) StVD (Stochastic Voxel Discard) and (2) NRConv (Noise-Resistant Submanifold Convolution). StVD alleviates the computation problem by discarding large amounts of nearby redundant voxels. NRConv tackles the noise problem by encoding voxel features in both 2D image and 3D LiDAR space. By integrating VirConv, we first develop an efficient pipeline VirConv-L based on an early fusion design. Then, we build a high-precision pipeline VirConv-T based on a transformed refinement scheme. Finally, we develop a semi-supervised pipeline VirConv-S based on a pseudo-label framework. On the KITTI car 3D detection test leaderboard, our VirConv-L achieves 85% AP with a fast running speed of 56ms. Our VirConv-T and VirConv-S attains a high-precision of 86.3% and 87.2% AP, and currently rank 2nd and 1st, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/hailanyi/VirConv.

Causal Social Explanations for Stochastic Sequential Multi-Agent Decision-Making

We present a novel framework to generate causal explanations for the decisions of agents in stochastic sequential multi-agent environments. Explanations are given via natural language conversations answering a wide range of user queries and requiring associative, interventionist, or counterfactual causal reasoning. Instead of assuming any specific causal graph, our method relies on a generative model of interactions to simulate counterfactual worlds which are used to identify the salient causes behind decisions. We implement our method for motion planning for autonomous driving and test it in simulated scenarios with coupled interactions. Our method correctly identifies and ranks the relevant causes and delivers concise explanations to the users' queries.

INCREASE: Inductive Graph Representation Learning for Spatio-Temporal Kriging

Spatio-temporal kriging is an important problem in web and social applications, such as Web or Internet of Things, where things (e.g., sensors) connected into a web often come with spatial and temporal properties. It aims to infer knowledge for (the things at) unobserved locations using the data from (the things at) observed locations during a given time period of interest. This problem essentially requires \emph{inductive learning}. Once trained, the model should be able to perform kriging for different locations including newly given ones, without retraining. However, it is challenging to perform accurate kriging results because of the heterogeneous spatial relations and diverse temporal patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel inductive graph representation learning model for spatio-temporal kriging. We first encode heterogeneous spatial relations between the unobserved and observed locations by their spatial proximity, functional similarity, and transition probability. Based on each relation, we accurately aggregate the information of most correlated observed locations to produce inductive representations for the unobserved locations, by jointly modeling their similarities and differences. Then, we design relation-aware gated recurrent unit (GRU) networks to adaptively capture the temporal correlations in the generated sequence representations for each relation. Finally, we propose a multi-relation attention mechanism to dynamically fuse the complex spatio-temporal information at different time steps from multiple relations to compute the kriging output. Experimental results on three real-world datasets show that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods consistently, and the advantage is more significant when there are fewer observed locations. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhengchuanpan/INCREASE.

State-Regularized Recurrent Neural Networks to Extract Automata and Explain Predictions

Recurrent neural networks are a widely used class of neural architectures. They have, however, two shortcomings. First, they are often treated as black-box models and as such it is difficult to understand what exactly they learn as well as how they arrive at a particular prediction. Second, they tend to work poorly on sequences requiring long-term memorization, despite having this capacity in principle. We aim to address both shortcomings with a class of recurrent networks that use a stochastic state transition mechanism between cell applications. This mechanism, which we term state-regularization, makes RNNs transition between a finite set of learnable states. We evaluate state-regularized RNNs on (1) regular languages for the purpose of automata extraction; (2) non-regular languages such as balanced parentheses and palindromes where external memory is required; and (3) real-word sequence learning tasks for sentiment analysis, visual object recognition and text categorisation. We show that state-regularization (a) simplifies the extraction of finite state automata that display an RNN's state transition dynamic; (b) forces RNNs to operate more like automata with external memory and less like finite state machines, which potentiality leads to a more structural memory; (c) leads to better interpretability and explainability of RNNs by leveraging the probabilistic finite state transition mechanism over time steps.

FedGS: Federated Graph-based Sampling with Arbitrary Client Availability

While federated learning has shown strong results in optimizing a machine learning model without direct access to the original data, its performance may be hindered by intermittent client availability which slows down the convergence and biases the final learned model. There are significant challenges to achieve both stable and bias-free training under arbitrary client availability. To address these challenges, we propose a framework named Federated Graph-based Sampling (FedGS), to stabilize the global model update and mitigate the long-term bias given arbitrary client availability simultaneously. First, we model the data correlations of clients with a Data-Distribution-Dependency Graph (3DG) that helps keep the sampled clients data apart from each other, which is theoretically shown to improve the approximation to the optimal model update. Second, constrained by the far-distance in data distribution of the sampled clients, we further minimize the variance of the numbers of times that the clients are sampled, to mitigate long-term bias. To validate the effectiveness of FedGS, we conduct experiments on three datasets under a comprehensive set of seven client availability modes. Our experimental results confirm FedGS's advantage in both enabling a fair client-sampling scheme and improving the model performance under arbitrary client availability. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/WwZzz/FedGS}.

Transformation-Equivariant 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving

3D object detection received increasing attention in autonomous driving recently. Objects in 3D scenes are distributed with diverse orientations. Ordinary detectors do not explicitly model the variations of rotation and reflection transformations. Consequently, large networks and extensive data augmentation are required for robust detection. Recent equivariant networks explicitly model the transformation variations by applying shared networks on multiple transformed point clouds, showing great potential in object geometry modeling. However, it is difficult to apply such networks to 3D object detection in autonomous driving due to its large computation cost and slow reasoning speed. In this work, we present TED, an efficient Transformation-Equivariant 3D Detector to overcome the computation cost and speed issues. TED first applies a sparse convolution backbone to extract multi-channel transformation-equivariant voxel features; and then aligns and aggregates these equivariant features into lightweight and compact representations for high-performance 3D object detection. On the highly competitive KITTI 3D car detection leaderboard, TED ranked 1st among all submissions with competitive efficiency.

Few-Shot Specific Emitter Identification via Hybrid Data Augmentation and Deep Metric Learning

Specific emitter identification (SEI) is a potential physical layer authentication technology, which is one of the most critical complements of upper layer authentication. Radio frequency fingerprint (RFF)-based SEI is to distinguish one emitter from each other by immutable RF characteristics from electronic components. Due to the powerful ability of deep learning (DL) to extract hidden features and perform classification, it can extract highly separative features from massive signal samples, thus enabling SEI. Considering the condition of limited training samples, we propose a novel few-shot SEI (FS-SEI) method based on hybrid data augmentation and deep metric learning (HDA-DML) which gets rid of the dependence on auxiliary datasets. Specifically, HDA consisting rotation and CutMix is designed to increase data diversity, and DML is used to extract high discriminative semantic features. The proposed HDA-DML-based FS-SEI method is evaluated on an open source large-scale real-world automatic-dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) dataset and a real-world WiFi dataset. The simulation results of two datasets show that the proposed method achieves better identification performance and higher feature discriminability than five latest FS-SEI methods.