Predictive Temporal Attention on Event-based Video Stream for Energy-efficient Situation Awareness

The Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) is an innovative technology that efficiently captures and encodes visual information in an event-driven manner. By combining it with event-driven neuromorphic processing, the sparsity in DVS camera output can result in high energy efficiency. However, similar to many embedded systems, the off-chip communication between the camera and processor presents a bottleneck in terms of power consumption. Inspired by the predictive coding model and expectation suppression phenomenon found in human brain, we propose a temporal attention mechanism to throttle the camera output and pay attention to it only when the visual events cannot be well predicted. The predictive attention not only reduces power consumption in the sensor-processor interface but also effectively decreases the computational workload by filtering out noisy events. We demonstrate that the predictive attention can reduce 46.7% of data communication between the camera and the processor and reduce 43.8% computation activities in the processor.

Improving Adversarial Transferability by Stable Diffusion

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are susceptible to adversarial examples, which introduce imperceptible perturbations to benign samples, deceiving DNN predictions. While some attack methods excel in the white-box setting, they often struggle in the black-box scenario, particularly against models fortified with defense mechanisms. Various techniques have emerged to enhance the transferability of adversarial attacks for the black-box scenario. Among these, input transformation-based attacks have demonstrated their effectiveness. In this paper, we explore the potential of leveraging data generated by Stable Diffusion to boost adversarial transferability. This approach draws inspiration from recent research that harnessed synthetic data generated by Stable Diffusion to enhance model generalization. In particular, previous work has highlighted the correlation between the presence of both real and synthetic data and improved model generalization. Building upon this insight, we introduce a novel attack method called Stable Diffusion Attack Method (SDAM), which incorporates samples generated by Stable Diffusion to augment input images. Furthermore, we propose a fast variant of SDAM to reduce computational overhead while preserving high adversarial transferability. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by a substantial margin. Moreover, our approach is compatible with existing transfer-based attacks to further enhance adversarial transferability.

Hybrid Map-Based Path Planning for Robot Navigation in Unstructured Environments

Fast and accurate path planning is important for ground robots to achieve safe and efficient autonomous navigation in unstructured outdoor environments. However, most existing methods exploiting either 2D or 2.5D maps struggle to balance the efficiency and safety for ground robots navigating in such challenging scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid map representation by fusing a 2D grid and a 2.5D digital elevation map. Based on it, a novel path planning method is proposed, which considers the robot poses during traversability estimation. By doing so, our method explicitly takes safety as a planning constraint enabling robots to navigate unstructured environments smoothly.The proposed approach has been evaluated on both simulated datasets and a real robot platform. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared to state-of-the-art baseline methods, the proposed approach consistently generates safer and easier paths for the robot in different unstructured outdoor environments. The implementation of our method is publicly available at https://github.com/nubot-nudt/T-Hybrid-planner.

Emerging Applications of Reversible Data Hiding

Reversible data hiding (RDH) is one special type of information hiding, by which the host sequence as well as the embedded data can be both restored from the marked sequence without loss. Beside media annotation and integrity authentication, recently some scholars begin to apply RDH in many other fields innovatively. In this paper, we summarize these emerging applications, including steganography, adversarial example, visual transformation, image processing, and give out the general frameworks to make these operations reversible. As far as we are concerned, this is the first paper to summarize the extended applications of RDH.

CAAD 2018: Iterative Ensemble Adversarial Attack

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have recently led to significant improvements in many fields. However, DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples which are samples with imperceptible perturbations while dramatically misleading the DNNs. Adversarial attacks can be used to evaluate the robustness of deep learning models before they are deployed. Unfortunately, most of existing adversarial attacks can only fool a black-box model with a low success rate. To improve the success rates for black-box adversarial attacks, we proposed an iterated adversarial attack against an ensemble of image classifiers. With this method, we won the 5th place in CAAD 2018 Targeted Adversarial Attack competition.

Reversible Adversarial Examples

Deep Neural Networks have recently led to significant improvement in many fields such as image classification and speech recognition. However, these machine learning models are vulnerable to adversarial examples which can mislead machine learning classifiers to give incorrect classifications. In this paper, we take advantage of reversible data hiding to construct reversible adversarial examples which are still misclassified by Deep Neural Networks. Furthermore, the proposed method can recover original images from reversible adversarial examples with no distortion.

Detection based Defense against Adversarial Examples from the Steganalysis Point ot View

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have recently led to significant improvements in many fields. However, DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples which are samples with imperceptible perturbations while dramatically misleading the DNNs. Moreover, adversarial examples can be used to perform an attack on various kinds of DNN based systems, even if the adversary has no access to the underlying model. Many defense methods have been proposed, such as obfuscating gradients of the networks or detecting adversarial examples. However it is proved out that these defense methods are not effective or cannot resist secondary adversarial attacks. In this paper, we point out that steganalysis can be applied to adversarial examples detection, and propose a method to enhance steganalysis features by estimating the probability of modifications caused by adversarial attacks. Experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately detect adversarial examples. Moreover, secondary adversarial attacks cannot be directly performed to our method because our method is not based on a neural network but based on high-dimensional artificial features and FLD (Fisher Linear Discriminant) ensemble.

Unsupervised Learning of Semantic Audio Representations

Even in the absence of any explicit semantic annotation, vast collections of audio recordings provide valuable information for learning the categorical structure of sounds. We consider several class-agnostic semantic constraints that apply to unlabeled nonspeech audio: (i) noise and translations in time do not change the underlying sound category, (ii) a mixture of two sound events inherits the categories of the constituents, and (iii) the categories of events in close temporal proximity are likely to be the same or related. Without labels to ground them, these constraints are incompatible with classification loss functions. However, they may still be leveraged to identify geometric inequalities needed for triplet loss-based training of convolutional neural networks. The result is low-dimensional embeddings of the input spectrograms that recover 41% and 84% of the performance of their fully-supervised counterparts when applied to downstream query-by-example sound retrieval and sound event classification tasks, respectively. Moreover, in limited-supervision settings, our unsupervised embeddings double the state-of-the-art classification performance.