LogoStyleFool: Vitiating Video Recognition Systems via Logo Style Transfer

Video recognition systems are vulnerable to adversarial examples. Recent studies show that style transfer-based and patch-based unrestricted perturbations can effectively improve attack efficiency. These attacks, however, face two main challenges: 1) Adding large stylized perturbations to all pixels reduces the naturalness of the video and such perturbations can be easily detected. 2) Patch-based video attacks are not extensible to targeted attacks due to the limited search space of reinforcement learning that has been widely used in video attacks recently. In this paper, we focus on the video black-box setting and propose a novel attack framework named LogoStyleFool by adding a stylized logo to the clean video. We separate the attack into three stages: style reference selection, reinforcement-learning-based logo style transfer, and perturbation optimization. We solve the first challenge by scaling down the perturbation range to a regional logo, while the second challenge is addressed by complementing an optimization stage after reinforcement learning. Experimental results substantiate the overall superiority of LogoStyleFool over three state-of-the-art patch-based attacks in terms of attack performance and semantic preservation. Meanwhile, LogoStyleFool still maintains its performance against two existing patch-based defense methods. We believe that our research is beneficial in increasing the attention of the security community to such subregional style transfer attacks.

Analysis of Weather and Time Features in Machine Learning-aided ERCOT Load Forecasting

Accurate load forecasting is critical for efficient and reliable operations of the electric power system. A large part of electricity consumption is affected by weather conditions, making weather information an important determinant of electricity usage. Personal appliances and industry equipment also contribute significantly to electricity demand with temporal patterns, making time a useful factor to consider in load forecasting. This work develops several machine learning (ML) models that take various time and weather information as part of the input features to predict the short-term system-wide total load. Ablation studies were also performed to investigate and compare the impacts of different weather factors on the prediction accuracy. Actual load and historical weather data for the same region were processed and then used to train the ML models. It is interesting to observe that using all available features, each of which may be correlated to the load, is unlikely to achieve the best forecasting performance; features with redundancy may even decrease the inference capabilities of ML models. This indicates the importance of feature selection for ML models. Overall, case studies demonstrated the effectiveness of ML models trained with different weather and time input features for ERCOT load forecasting.

Track-before-detect Algorithm based on Cost-reference Particle Filter Bank for Weak Target Detection

Detecting weak target is an important and challenging problem in many applications such as radar, sonar etc. However, conventional detection methods are often ineffective in this case because of low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This paper presents a track-before-detect (TBD) algorithm based on an improved particle filter, i.e. cost-reference particle filter bank (CRPFB), which turns the problem of target detection to the problem of two-layer hypothesis testing. The first layer is implemented by CRPFB for state estimation of possible target. CRPFB has entirely parallel structure, consisting amounts of cost-reference particle filters with different hypothesized prior information. The second layer is to compare a test metric with a given threshold, which is constructed from the output of the first layer and fits GEV distribution. The performance of our proposed TBD algorithm and the existed TBD algorithms are compared according to the experiments on nonlinear frequency modulated (NLFM) signal detection and tracking. Simulation results show that the proposed TBD algorithm has better performance than the state-of-the-arts in detection, tracking, and time efficiency.

Towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in the Internet of Things (IoT): Opportunities and Challenges

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), possessing the capacity to comprehend, learn, and execute tasks with human cognitive abilities, engenders significant anticipation and intrigue across scientific, commercial, and societal arenas. This fascination extends particularly to the Internet of Things (IoT), a landscape characterized by the interconnection of countless devices, sensors, and systems, collectively gathering and sharing data to enable intelligent decision-making and automation. This research embarks on an exploration of the opportunities and challenges towards achieving AGI in the context of the IoT. Specifically, it starts by outlining the fundamental principles of IoT and the critical role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in IoT systems. Subsequently, it delves into AGI fundamentals, culminating in the formulation of a conceptual framework for AGI's seamless integration within IoT. The application spectrum for AGI-infused IoT is broad, encompassing domains ranging from smart grids, residential environments, manufacturing, and transportation to environmental monitoring, agriculture, healthcare, and education. However, adapting AGI to resource-constrained IoT settings necessitates dedicated research efforts. Furthermore, the paper addresses constraints imposed by limited computing resources, intricacies associated with large-scale IoT communication, as well as the critical concerns pertaining to security and privacy.

Mobilizing Personalized Federated Learning via Random Walk Stochastic ADMM

In this research, we investigate the barriers associated with implementing Federated Learning (FL) in real-world scenarios, where a consistent connection between the central server and all clients cannot be maintained, and data distribution is heterogeneous. To address these challenges, we focus on mobilizing the federated setting, where the server moves between groups of adjacent clients to learn local models. Specifically, we propose a new algorithm, Random Walk Stochastic Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (RWSADMM), capable of adapting to dynamic and ad-hoc network conditions as long as a sufficient number of connected clients are available for model training. In RWSADMM, the server walks randomly toward a group of clients. It formulates local proximity among adjacent clients based on hard inequality constraints instead of consensus updates to address data heterogeneity. Our proposed method is convergent, reduces communication costs, and enhances scalability by reducing the number of clients the central server needs to communicate with.

Edge Attention-based Multi-Relational Graph Convolutional Networks

Graph convolutional network (GCN) is generalization of convolutional neural network (CNN) to work with arbitrarily structured graphs. A binary adjacency matrix is commonly used in training a GCN. Recently, the attention mechanism allows the network to learn a dynamic and adaptive aggregation of the neighborhood. We propose a new GCN model on the graphs where edges are characterized in multiple views or precisely in terms of multiple relationships. For instance, in chemical graph theory, compound structures are often represented by the hydrogen-depleted molecular graph where nodes correspond to atoms and edges correspond to chemical bonds. Multiple attributes can be important to characterize chemical bonds, such as atom pair (the types of atoms that a bond connects), aromaticity, and whether a bond is in a ring. The different attributes lead to different graph representations for the same molecule. There is growing interests in both chemistry and machine learning fields to directly learn molecular properties of compounds from the molecular graph, instead of from fingerprints predefined by chemists. The proposed GCN model, which we call edge attention-based multi-relational GCN (EAGCN), jointly learns attention weights and node features in graph convolution. For each bond attribute, a real-valued attention matrix is used to replace the binary adjacency matrix. By designing a dictionary for the edge attention, and forming the attention matrix of each molecule by looking up the dictionary, the EAGCN exploits correspondence between bonds in different molecules. The prediction of compound properties is based on the aggregated node features, which is independent of the varying molecule (graph) size. We demonstrate the efficacy of the EAGCN on multiple chemical datasets: Tox21, HIV, Freesolv, and Lipophilicity, and interpret the resultant attention weights.

VIGAN: Missing View Imputation with Generative Adversarial Networks

In an era when big data are becoming the norm, there is less concern with the quantity but more with the quality and completeness of the data. In many disciplines, data are collected from heterogeneous sources, resulting in multi-view or multi-modal datasets. The missing data problem has been challenging to address in multi-view data analysis. Especially, when certain samples miss an entire view of data, it creates the missing view problem. Classic multiple imputations or matrix completion methods are hardly effective here when no information can be based on in the specific view to impute data for such samples. The commonly-used simple method of removing samples with a missing view can dramatically reduce sample size, thus diminishing the statistical power of a subsequent analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for view imputation via generative adversarial networks (GANs), which we name by VIGAN. This approach first treats each view as a separate domain and identifies domain-to-domain mappings via a GAN using randomly-sampled data from each view, and then employs a multi-modal denoising autoencoder (DAE) to reconstruct the missing view from the GAN outputs based on paired data across the views. Then, by optimizing the GAN and DAE jointly, our model enables the knowledge integration for domain mappings and view correspondences to effectively recover the missing view. Empirical results on benchmark datasets validate the VIGAN approach by comparing against the state of the art. The evaluation of VIGAN in a genetic study of substance use disorders further proves the effectiveness and usability of this approach in life science.