Structured Multimodal Attentions for TextVQA

Text based Visual Question Answering (TextVQA) is a recently raised challenge that requires a machine to read text in images and answer natural language questions by jointly reasoning over the question, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tokens and visual content. Most of the state-of-the-art (SoTA) VQA methods fail to answer these questions because of i) poor text reading ability; ii) lacking of text-visual reasoning capacity; and iii) adopting a discriminative answering mechanism instead of a generative one which is hard to cover both OCR tokens and general text tokens in the final answer. In this paper, we propose a structured multimodal attention (SMA) neural network to solve the above issues. Our SMA first uses a structural graph representation to encode the object-object, object-text and text-text relationships appearing in the image, and then design a multimodal graph attention network to reason over it. Finally, the outputs from the above module are processed by a global-local attentional answering module to produce an answer that covers tokens from both OCR and general text iteratively. Our proposed model outperforms the SoTA models on TextVQA dataset and all three tasks of ST-VQA dataset. To provide an upper bound for our method and a fair testing base for further works, we also provide human-annotated ground-truth OCR annotations for the TextVQA dataset, which were not given in the original release.

Attacking Recommender Systems with Augmented User Profiles

Recommendation Systems (RS) have become an essential part of many online services. Due to its pivotal role of guiding customers towards purchasing, there is a natural motivation for unscrupulous parties to spoof RS for profits. In this paper we study the shilling attack: a subsistent and profitable attack where an adversarial party injects a number of user profiles to promote or demote a target item. Conventional shilling attack models are based on simple heuristics that can be easily detected, or directly adopt adversarial attack methods without a special design for RS. Moreover, the study on the attack impact on deep learning based RS is missing in the literature, making the effects of shilling attack against real RS doubtful. We present a novel Augmented Shilling Attack framework (AUSH) and implement it with the idea of Generative Adversarial Network. AUSH is capable of tailoring attacks against RS according to budget and complex attack goals such as targeting on a specific user group. We experimentally show that the attack impact of AUSH is noticeable on a wide range of RS including both classic and modern deep learning based RS, while it is virtually undetectable by the state-of-the-art attack detection model.

Intention Propagation for Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

A hallmark of an AI agent is to mimic human beings to understand and interact with others. In this paper, we propose a collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm to learn a \emph{joint} policy through the interactions over agents. To make a joint decision over the group, each agent makes an initial decision and tells its policy to its neighbors. Then each agent modifies its own policy properly based on received messages and spreads out its plan. As this intention propagation procedure goes on, we prove that it converges to a mean-field approximation of the joint policy with the framework of neural embedded probabilistic inference. We evaluate our algorithm on several large scale challenging tasks and demonstrate that it outperforms previous state-of-the-arts.

Underwater image enhancement with Image Colorfulness Measure

Due to the absorption and scattering effects of the water, underwater images tend to suffer from many severe problems, such as low contrast, grayed out colors and blurring content. To improve the visual quality of underwater images, we proposed a novel enhancement model, which is a trainable end-to-end neural model. Two parts constitute the overall model. The first one is a non-parameter layer for the preliminary color correction, then the second part is consisted of parametric layers for a self-adaptive refinement, namely the channel-wise linear shift. For better details, contrast and colorfulness, this enhancement network is jointly optimized by the pixel-level and characteristiclevel training criteria. Through extensive experiments on natural underwater scenes, we show that the proposed method can get high quality enhancement results.

Machine-learning-based methods for output only structural modal identification

In this study, we propose a machine-learning-based approach to identify the modal parameters of the output only data for structural health monitoring (SHM) that makes full use of the characteristic of independence of modal responses and the principle of machine learning. By taking advantage of the independence feature of each mode, we use the principle of unsupervised learning, making the training process of the deep neural network becomes the process of modal separation. A self-coding deep neural network is designed to identify the structural modal parameters from the vibration data of structures. The mixture signals, that is, the structural response data, are used as the input of the neural network. Then we use a complex cost function to restrict the training process of the neural network, making the output of the third layer the modal responses we want, and the weights of the last two layers are mode shapes. The deep neural network is essentially a nonlinear objective function optimization problem. A novel loss function is proposed to constrain the independent feature with consideration of uncorrelation and non-Gaussianity to restrict the designed neural network to obtain the structural modal parameters. A numerical example of a simple structure and an example of actual SHM data from a cable-stayed bridge are presented to illustrate the modal parameter identification ability of the proposed approach. The results show the approach s good capability in blindly extracting modal information from system responses.

Recovering compressed images for automatic crack segmentation using generative models

In a structural health monitoring (SHM) system that uses digital cameras to monitor cracks of structural surfaces, techniques for reliable and effective data compression are essential to ensure a stable and energy efficient crack images transmission in wireless devices, e.g., drones and robots with high definition cameras installed. Compressive sensing (CS) is a signal processing technique that allows accurate recovery of a signal from a sampling rate much smaller than the limitation of the Nyquist sampling theorem. The conventional CS method is based on the principle that, through a regularized optimization, the sparsity property of the original signals in some domain can be exploited to get the exact reconstruction with a high probability. However, the strong assumption of the signals being highly sparse in an invertible space is relatively hard for real crack images. In this paper, we present a new approach of CS that replaces the sparsity regularization with a generative model that is able to effectively capture a low dimension representation of targeted images. We develop a recovery framework for automatic crack segmentation of compressed crack images based on this new CS method and demonstrate the remarkable performance of the method taking advantage of the strong capability of generative models to capture the necessary features required in the crack segmentation task even the backgrounds of the generated images are not well reconstructed. The superior performance of our recovery framework is illustrated by comparing with three existing CS algorithms. Furthermore, we show that our framework is extensible to other common problems in automatic crack segmentation, such as defect recovery from motion blurring and occlusion.

Dynamic Experience Replay

We present a novel technique called Dynamic Experience Replay (DER) that allows Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms to use experience replay samples not only from human demonstrations but also successful transitions generated by RL agents during training and therefore improve training efficiency. It can be combined with an arbitrary off-policy RL algorithm, such as DDPG or DQN, and their distributed versions. We build upon Ape-X DDPG and demonstrate our approach on robotic tight-fitting joint assembly tasks, based on force/torque and Cartesian pose observations. In particular, we run experiments on two different tasks: peg-in-hole and lap-joint. In each case, we compare different replay buffer structures and how DER affects them. Our ablation studies show that Dynamic Experience Replay is a crucial ingredient that either largely shortens the training time in these challenging environments or solves the tasks that the vanilla Ape-X DDPG cannot solve. We also show that our policies learned purely in simulation can be deployed successfully on the real robot. The video presenting our experiments is available at https://sites.google.com/site/dynamicexperiencereplay

Mitigating Query-Flooding Parameter Duplication Attack on Regression Models with High-Dimensional Gaussian Mechanism

Public intelligent services enabled by machine learning algorithms are vulnerable to model extraction attacks that can steal confidential information of the learning models through public queries. Differential privacy (DP) has been considered a promising technique to mitigate this attack. However, we find that the vulnerability persists when regression models are being protected by current DP solutions. We show that the adversary can launch a query-flooding parameter duplication (QPD) attack to infer the model information by repeated queries. To defend against the QPD attack on logistic and linear regression models, we propose a novel High-Dimensional Gaussian (HDG) mechanism to prevent unauthorized information disclosure without interrupting the intended services. In contrast to prior work, the proposed HDG mechanism will dynamically generate the privacy budget and random noise for different queries and their results to enhance the obfuscation. Besides, for the first time, HDG enables an optimal privacy budget allocation that automatically determines the minimum amount of noise to be added per user-desired privacy level on each dimension. We comprehensively evaluate the performance of HDG using real-world datasets and shows that HDG effectively mitigates the QPD attack while satisfying the privacy requirements. We also prepare to open-source the relevant codes to the community for further research.

Improved dual channel pulse coupled neural network and its application to multi-focus image fusion

This paper presents an improved dual channel pulse coupled neural network (IDC-PCNN) model for image fusion. The model can overcome some defects of standard PCNN model. In this fusion scheme, the multiplication rule is replaced by addition rule in the information fusion pool of dual channel PCNN (DC-PCNN) model. Meanwhile the sum of modified Laplacian (SML) measure is adopted, which is better than other focus measures. This method not only inherits the good characteristics of the standard PCNN model but also enhances the computing efficiency and fusion quality. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by using four criteria including average cross entropy, root mean square error, peak value signal to noise ratio and structure similarity index. Comparative studies show that the proposed fusion algorithm outperforms the standard PCNN method and the DC-PCNN method.

Multi-focus Image Fusion Based on Similarity Characteristics

A novel multi-focus image fusion algorithm performed in spatial domain based on similarity characteristics is proposed incorporating with region segmentation. In this paper, a new similarity measure is developed based on the structural similarity (SSIM) index, which is more suitable for multi-focus image segmentation. Firstly, the SSNSIM map is calculated between two input images. Then we segment the SSNSIM map using watershed method, and merge the small homogeneous regions with fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm (FCM). For three source images, a joint region segmentation method based on segmentation of two images is used to obtain the final segmentation result. Finally, the corresponding segmented regions of the source images are fused according to their average gradient. The performance of the image fusion method is evaluated by several criteria including spatial frequency, average gradient, entropy, edge retention etc. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed method is effective and has good visual perception.