A good training set for speech spoofing countermeasures requires diverse TTS and VC spoofing attacks, but generating TTS and VC spoofed trials for a target speaker may be technically demanding. Instead of using full-fledged TTS and VC systems, this study uses neural-network-based vocoders to do copy-synthesis on bona fide utterances. The output data can be used as spoofed data. To make better use of pairs of bona fide and spoofed data, this study introduces a contrastive feature loss that can be plugged into the standard training criterion. On the basis of the bona fide trials from the ASVspoof 2019 logical access training set, this study empirically compared a few training sets created in the proposed manner using a few neural non-autoregressive vocoders. Results on multiple test sets suggest good practices such as fine-tuning neural vocoders using bona fide data from the target domain. The results also demonstrated the effectiveness of the contrastive feature loss. Combining the best practices, the trained CM achieved overall competitive performance. Its EERs on the ASVspoof 2021 hidden subsets also outperformed the top-1 challenge submissions.
Intellectual property (IP) protection for Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has raised serious concerns in recent years. Most existing works embed watermarks in the DNN model for IP protection, which need to modify the model and lack of interpretability. In this paper, for the first time, we propose an interpretable intellectual property protection method for DNN based on explainable artificial intelligence. Compared with existing works, the proposed method does not modify the DNN model, and the decision of the ownership verification is interpretable. We extract the intrinsic features of the DNN model by using Deep Taylor Decomposition. Since the intrinsic feature is composed of unique interpretation of the model's decision, the intrinsic feature can be regarded as fingerprint of the model. If the fingerprint of a suspected model is the same as the original model, the suspected model is considered as a pirated model. Experimental results demonstrate that the fingerprints can be successfully used to verify the ownership of the model and the test accuracy of the model is not affected. Furthermore, the proposed method is robust to fine-tuning attack, pruning attack, watermark overwriting attack, and adaptive attack.
Detecting manipulated facial images and videos on social networks has been an urgent problem to be solved. The compression of videos on social media has destroyed some pixel details that could be used to detect forgeries. Hence, it is crucial to detect manipulated faces in videos of different quality. We propose a new multi-stream network architecture named GGViT, which utilizes global information to improve the generalization of the model. The embedding of the whole face extracted by ViT will guide each stream network. Through a large number of experiments, we have proved that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracy on FF++ dataset, and has been greatly improved on scenarios of different compression rates. The accuracy of Raw/C23, Raw/C40 and C23/C40 was increased by 24.34%, 15.08% and 10.14% respectively.
The amounts of data that need to be transmitted, processed, and stored by the modern deep neural networks have reached truly enormous volumes in the last few years calling for the invention of new paradigms both in hardware and software development. One of the most promising and rapidly advancing frontiers here is the creation of new data formats. In this work we focus on the family of block floating point numerical formats due to their combination of wide dynamic range, numerical accuracy, and efficient hardware implementation of inner products using simple integer arithmetic. These formats are characterized by a block of mantissas with a shared scale factor. The basic Block Floating Point (BFP) format quantizes the block scales into the nearest powers of two on the right. Its simple modification - Scaled BFP (SBFP) - stores the same scales in full precision and thus allows higher accuracy. In this paper, we study the statistical behavior of both these formats rigorously. We develop asymptotic bounds on the inner product error in SBFP- and BFP-quantized normally distributed vectors. Next, we refine those asymptotic results to finite dimensional settings and derive high-dimensional tight bounds for the same errors. Based on the obtained results we introduce a performance metric assessing accuracy of any block format. This metric allows us to determine the optimal parameters, such as the block size, yielding highest accuracy. In particular, we show that if the precision of the BFP format is fixed at 4 bits, the optimal block size becomes 64. All theoretical derivations are supported by numerical experiments and studies on the weights of publicly available pretrained neural networks.
Usually, lesions are not isolated but are associated with the surrounding tissues. For example, the growth of a tumour can depend on or infiltrate into the surrounding tissues. Due to the pathological nature of the lesions, it is challenging to distinguish their boundaries in medical imaging. However, these uncertain regions may contain diagnostic information. Therefore, the simple binarization of lesions by traditional binary segmentation can result in the loss of diagnostic information. In this work, we introduce the image matting into the 3D scenes and use the alpha matte, i.e., a soft mask, to describe lesions in a 3D medical image. The traditional soft mask acted as a training trick to compensate for the easily mislabelled or under-labelled ambiguous regions. In contrast, 3D matting uses soft segmentation to characterize the uncertain regions more finely, which means that it retains more structural information for subsequent diagnosis and treatment. The current study of image matting methods in 3D is limited. To address this issue, we conduct a comprehensive study of 3D matting, including both traditional and deep-learning-based methods. We adapt four state-of-the-art 2D image matting algorithms to 3D scenes and further customize the methods for CT images to calibrate the alpha matte with the radiodensity. Moreover, we propose the first end-to-end deep 3D matting network and implement a solid 3D medical image matting benchmark. Its efficient counterparts are also proposed to achieve a good performance-computation balance. Furthermore, there is no high-quality annotated dataset related to 3D matting, slowing down the development of data-driven deep-learning-based methods. To address this issue, we construct the first 3D medical matting dataset. The validity of the dataset was verified through clinicians' assessments and downstream experiments.
Synchronous local stochastic gradient descent (local SGD) suffers from some workers being idle and random delays due to slow and straggling workers, as it waits for the workers to complete the same amount of local updates. In this paper, to mitigate stragglers and improve communication efficiency, a novel local SGD strategy, named HetSyn, is developed. The key point is to keep all the workers computing continually at each synchronization round, and make full use of any effective (completed) local update of each worker regardless of stragglers. An analysis of the average wall-clock time, average number of local updates and average number of uploading workers per round is provided to gauge the performance of HetSyn. The convergence of HetSyn is also rigorously established even when the objective function is nonconvex. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed HetSyn against state-of-the-art schemes through utilization of additional effective local updates at each worker, and the influence of system parameters is studied. By allowing heterogeneous synchronization with different numbers of local updates across workers, HetSyn provides substantial improvements both in time and communication efficiency.
Benchmarking initiatives support the meaningful comparison of competing solutions to prominent problems in speech and language processing. Successive benchmarking evaluations typically reflect a progressive evolution from ideal lab conditions towards to those encountered in the wild. ASVspoof, the spoofing and deepfake detection initiative and challenge series, has followed the same trend. This article provides a summary of the ASVspoof 2021 challenge and the results of 37 participating teams. For the logical access task, results indicate that countermeasures solutions are robust to newly introduced encoding and transmission effects. Results for the physical access task indicate the potential to detect replay attacks in real, as opposed to simulated physical spaces, but a lack of robustness to variations between simulated and real acoustic environments. The DF task, new to the 2021 edition, targets solutions to the detection of manipulated, compressed speech data posted online. While detection solutions offer some resilience to compression effects, they lack generalization across different source datasets. In addition to a summary of the top-performing systems for each task, new analyses of influential data factors and results for hidden data subsets, the article includes a review of post-challenge results, an outline of the principal challenge limitations and a road-map for the future of ASVspoof. Link to the ASVspoof challenge and related resources: https://www.asvspoof.org/index2021.html
It is a challenge to segment the location and size of rectal cancer tumours through deep learning. In this paper, in order to improve the ability of extracting suffi-cient feature information in rectal tumour segmentation, attention enlarged ConvNeXt UNet (AACN-UNet), is proposed. The network mainly includes two improvements: 1) the encoder stage of UNet is changed to ConvNeXt structure for encoding operation, which can not only integrate multi-scale semantic information on a large scale, but al-so reduce information loss and extract more feature information from CT images; 2) CBAM attention mechanism is added to improve the connection of each feature in channel and space, which is conducive to extracting the effective feature of the target and improving the segmentation accuracy.The experiment with UNet and its variant network shows that AACN-UNet is 0.9% ,1.1% and 1.4% higher than the current best results in P, F1 and Miou.Compared with the training time, the number of parameters in UNet network is less. This shows that our proposed AACN-UNet has achieved ex-cellent results in CT image segmentation of rectal cancer.
There are two popular loss functions used for vision-language retrieval, i.e., triplet loss and contrastive learning loss, both of them essentially minimize the difference between the similarities of negative pairs and positive pairs. More specifically, Triplet loss with Hard Negative mining (Triplet-HN), which is widely used in existing retrieval models to improve the discriminative ability, is easy to fall into local minima in training. On the other hand, Vision-Language Contrastive learning loss (VLC), which is widely used in the vision-language pre-training, has been shown to achieve significant performance gains on vision-language retrieval, but the performance of fine-tuning with VLC on small datasets is not satisfactory. This paper proposes a unified loss of pair similarity optimization for vision-language retrieval, providing a powerful tool for understanding existing loss functions. Our unified loss includes the hard sample mining strategy of VLC and introduces the margin used by the triplet loss for better similarity separation. It is shown that both Triplet-HN and VLC are special forms of our unified loss. Compared with the Triplet-HN, our unified loss has a fast convergence speed. Compared with the VLC, our unified loss is more discriminative and can provide better generalization in downstream fine-tuning tasks. Experiments on image-text and video-text retrieval benchmarks show that our unified loss can significantly improve the performance of the state-of-the-art retrieval models.
Three-dimensional (3D) images, such as CT, MRI, and PET, are common in medical imaging applications and important in clinical diagnosis. Semantic ambiguity is a typical feature of many medical image labels. It can be caused by many factors, such as the imaging properties, pathological anatomy, and the weak representation of the binary masks, which brings challenges to accurate 3D segmentation. In 2D medical images, using soft masks instead of binary masks generated by image matting to characterize lesions can provide rich semantic information, describe the structural characteristics of lesions more comprehensively, and thus benefit the subsequent diagnoses and analyses. In this work, we introduce image matting into the 3D scenes to describe the lesions in 3D medical images. The study of image matting in 3D modality is limited, and there is no high-quality annotated dataset related to 3D matting, therefore slowing down the development of data-driven deep-learning-based methods. To address this issue, we constructed the first 3D medical matting dataset and convincingly verified the validity of the dataset through quality control and downstream experiments in lung nodules classification. We then adapt the four selected state-of-the-art 2D image matting algorithms to 3D scenes and further customize the methods for CT images. Also, we propose the first end-to-end deep 3D matting network and implement a solid 3D medical image matting benchmark, which will be released to encourage further research.