Auto-Landmark: Acoustic Landmark Dataset and Open-Source Toolkit for Landmark Extraction

In the speech signal, acoustic landmarks identify times when the acoustic manifestations of the linguistically motivated distinctive features are most salient. Acoustic landmarks have been widely applied in various domains, including speech recognition, speech depression detection, clinical analysis of speech abnormalities, and the detection of disordered speech. However, there is currently no dataset available that provides precise timing information for landmarks, which has been proven to be crucial for downstream applications involving landmarks. In this paper, we selected the most useful acoustic landmarks based on previous research and annotated the TIMIT dataset with them, based on a combination of phoneme boundary information and manual inspection. Moreover, previous landmark extraction tools were not open source or benchmarked, so to address this, we developed an open source Python-based landmark extraction tool and established a series of landmark detection baselines. The first of their kinds, the dataset with landmark precise timing information, landmark extraction tool and baselines are designed to support a wide variety of future research.

ROCAS: Root Cause Analysis of Autonomous Driving Accidents via Cyber-Physical Co-mutation

As Autonomous driving systems (ADS) have transformed our daily life, safety of ADS is of growing significance. While various testing approaches have emerged to enhance the ADS reliability, a crucial gap remains in understanding the accidents causes. Such post-accident analysis is paramount and beneficial for enhancing ADS safety and reliability. Existing cyber-physical system (CPS) root cause analysis techniques are mainly designed for drones and cannot handle the unique challenges introduced by more complex physical environments and deep learning models deployed in ADS. In this paper, we address the gap by offering a formal definition of ADS root cause analysis problem and introducing ROCAS, a novel ADS root cause analysis framework featuring cyber-physical co-mutation. Our technique uniquely leverages both physical and cyber mutation that can precisely identify the accident-trigger entity and pinpoint the misconfiguration of the target ADS responsible for an accident. We further design a differential analysis to identify the responsible module to reduce search space for the misconfiguration. We study 12 categories of ADS accidents and demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of ROCAS in narrowing down search space and pinpointing the misconfiguration. We also show detailed case studies on how the identified misconfiguration helps understand rationale behind accidents.

Rethinking Mamba in Speech Processing by Self-Supervised Models

The Mamba-based model has demonstrated outstanding performance across tasks in computer vision, natural language processing, and speech processing. However, in the realm of speech processing, the Mamba-based model's performance varies across different tasks. For instance, in tasks such as speech enhancement and spectrum reconstruction, the Mamba model performs well when used independently. However, for tasks like speech recognition, additional modules are required to surpass the performance of attention-based models. We propose the hypothesis that the Mamba-based model excels in "reconstruction" tasks within speech processing. However, for "classification tasks" such as Speech Recognition, additional modules are necessary to accomplish the "reconstruction" step. To validate our hypothesis, we analyze the previous Mamba-based Speech Models from an information theory perspective. Furthermore, we leveraged the properties of HuBERT in our study. We trained a Mamba-based HuBERT model, and the mutual information patterns, along with the model's performance metrics, confirmed our assumptions.

Detection of False Data Injection Attacks (FDIA) on Power Dynamical Systems With a State Prediction Method

With the deeper penetration of inverter-based resources in power systems, false data injection attacks (FDIA) are a growing cyber-security concern. They have the potential to disrupt the system's stability like frequency stability, thereby leading to catastrophic failures. Therefore, an FDIA detection method would be valuable to protect power systems. FDIAs typically induce a discrepancy between the desired and the effective behavior of the power system dynamics. A suitable detection method can leverage power dynamics predictions to identify whether such a discrepancy was induced by an FDIA. This work investigates the efficacy of temporal and spatio-temporal state prediction models, such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and a combination of Graph Neural Networks (GNN) with LSTM, for predicting frequency dynamics in the absence of an FDIA but with noisy measurements, and thereby identify FDIA events. For demonstration purposes, the IEEE 39 New England Kron-reduced model simulated with a swing equation is considered. It is shown that the proposed state prediction models can be used as a building block for developing an effective FDIA detection method that can maintain high detection accuracy across various attack and deployment settings. It is also shown how the FDIA detection should be deployed to limit its exposure to detection inaccuracies and mitigate its computational burden.

General OCR Theory: Towards OCR-2.0 via a Unified End-to-end Model

Traditional OCR systems (OCR-1.0) are increasingly unable to meet people's usage due to the growing demand for intelligent processing of man-made optical characters. In this paper, we collectively refer to all artificial optical signals (e.g., plain texts, math/molecular formulas, tables, charts, sheet music, and even geometric shapes) as "characters" and propose the General OCR Theory along with an excellent model, namely GOT, to promote the arrival of OCR-2.0. The GOT, with 580M parameters, is a unified, elegant, and end-to-end model, consisting of a high-compression encoder and a long-contexts decoder. As an OCR-2.0 model, GOT can handle all the above "characters" under various OCR tasks. On the input side, the model supports commonly used scene- and document-style images in slice and whole-page styles. On the output side, GOT can generate plain or formatted results (markdown/tikz/smiles/kern) via an easy prompt. Besides, the model enjoys interactive OCR features, i.e., region-level recognition guided by coordinates or colors. Furthermore, we also adapt dynamic resolution and multi-page OCR technologies to GOT for better practicality. In experiments, we provide sufficient results to prove the superiority of our model.

Discovery of False Data Injection Schemes on Frequency Controllers with Reinforcement Learning

While inverter-based distributed energy resources (DERs) play a crucial role in integrating renewable energy into the power system, they concurrently diminish the grid's system inertia, elevating the risk of frequency instabilities. Furthermore, smart inverters, interfaced via communication networks, pose a potential vulnerability to cyber threats if not diligently managed. To proactively fortify the power grid against sophisticated cyber attacks, we propose to employ reinforcement learning (RL) to identify potential threats and system vulnerabilities. This study concentrates on analyzing adversarial strategies for false data injection, specifically targeting smart inverters involved in primary frequency control. Our findings demonstrate that an RL agent can adeptly discern optimal false data injection methods to manipulate inverter settings, potentially causing catastrophic consequences.

XNN: Paradigm Shift in Mitigating Identity Leakage within Cloud-Enabled Deep Learning

In the domain of cloud-based deep learning, the imperative for external computational resources coexists with acute privacy concerns, particularly identity leakage. To address this challenge, we introduce XNN and XNN-d, pioneering methodologies that infuse neural network features with randomized perturbations, striking a harmonious balance between utility and privacy. XNN, designed for the training phase, ingeniously blends random permutation with matrix multiplication techniques to obfuscate feature maps, effectively shielding private data from potential breaches without compromising training integrity. Concurrently, XNN-d, devised for the inference phase, employs adversarial training to integrate generative adversarial noise. This technique effectively counters black-box access attacks aimed at identity extraction, while a distilled face recognition network adeptly processes the perturbed features, ensuring accurate identification. Our evaluation demonstrates XNN's effectiveness, significantly outperforming existing methods in reducing identity leakage while maintaining a high model accuracy.

Poisoning with A Pill: Circumventing Detection in Federated Learning

Without direct access to the client's data, federated learning (FL) is well-known for its unique strength in data privacy protection among existing distributed machine learning techniques. However, its distributive and iterative nature makes FL inherently vulnerable to various poisoning attacks. To counteract these threats, extensive defenses have been proposed to filter out malicious clients, using various detection metrics. Based on our analysis of existing attacks and defenses, we find that there is a lack of attention to model redundancy. In neural networks, various model parameters contribute differently to the model's performance. However, existing attacks in FL manipulate all the model update parameters with the same strategy, making them easily detectable by common defenses. Meanwhile, the defenses also tend to analyze the overall statistical features of the entire model updates, leaving room for sophisticated attacks. Based on these observations, this paper proposes a generic and attack-agnostic augmentation approach designed to enhance the effectiveness and stealthiness of existing FL poisoning attacks against detection in FL, pointing out the inherent flaws of existing defenses and exposing the necessity of fine-grained FL security. Specifically, we employ a three-stage methodology that strategically constructs, generates, and injects poison (generated by existing attacks) into a pill (a tiny subnet with a novel structure) during the FL training, named as pill construction, pill poisoning, and pill injection accordingly. Extensive experimental results show that FL poisoning attacks enhanced by our method can bypass all the popular defenses, and can gain an up to 7x error rate increase, as well as on average a more than 2x error rate increase on both IID and non-IID data, in both cross-silo and cross-device FL systems.

UNIT: Backdoor Mitigation via Automated Neural Distribution Tightening

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated effectiveness in various fields. However, DNNs are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, which inject a unique pattern, called trigger, into the input to cause misclassification to an attack-chosen target label. While existing works have proposed various methods to mitigate backdoor effects in poisoned models, they tend to be less effective against recent advanced attacks. In this paper, we introduce a novel post-training defense technique UNIT that can effectively eliminate backdoor effects for a variety of attacks. In specific, UNIT approximates a unique and tight activation distribution for each neuron in the model. It then proactively dispels substantially large activation values that exceed the approximated boundaries. Our experimental results demonstrate that UNIT outperforms 7 popular defense methods against 14 existing backdoor attacks, including 2 advanced attacks, using only 5\% of clean training data. UNIT is also cost efficient. The code is accessible at https://github.com/Megum1/UNIT.

DreamBench++: A Human-Aligned Benchmark for Personalized Image Generation

Personalized image generation holds great promise in assisting humans in everyday work and life due to its impressive function in creatively generating personalized content. However, current evaluations either are automated but misalign with humans or require human evaluations that are time-consuming and expensive. In this work, we present DreamBench++, a human-aligned benchmark automated by advanced multimodal GPT models. Specifically, we systematically design the prompts to let GPT be both human-aligned and self-aligned, empowered with task reinforcement. Further, we construct a comprehensive dataset comprising diverse images and prompts. By benchmarking 7 modern generative models, we demonstrate that DreamBench++ results in significantly more human-aligned evaluation, helping boost the community with innovative findings.