Image super-resolution (SR) is a technique to recover lost high-frequency information in low-resolution (LR) images. Spatial-domain information has been widely exploited to implement image SR, so a new trend is to involve frequency-domain information in SR tasks. Besides, image SR is typically application-oriented and various computer vision tasks call for image arbitrary magnification. Therefore, in this paper, we study image features in the frequency domain to design a novel scale-arbitrary image SR network. First, we statistically analyze LR-HR image pairs of several datasets under different scale factors and find that the high-frequency spectra of different images under different scale factors suffer from different degrees of degradation, but the valid low-frequency spectra tend to be retained within a certain distribution range. Then, based on this finding, we devise an adaptive scale-aware feature division mechanism using deep reinforcement learning, which can accurately and adaptively divide the frequency spectrum into the low-frequency part to be retained and the high-frequency one to be recovered. Finally, we design a scale-aware feature recovery module to capture and fuse multi-level features for reconstructing the high-frequency spectrum at arbitrary scale factors. Extensive experiments on public datasets show the superiority of our method compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is one of the most popular algorithms to realize an autonomous driving (AD) system. The key success factor of DRL is that it embraces the perception capability of deep neural networks which, however, have been proven vulnerable to Trojan attacks. Trojan attacks have been widely explored in supervised learning (SL) tasks (e.g., image classification), but rarely in sequential decision-making tasks solved by DRL. Hence, in this paper, we explore Trojan attacks on DRL for AD tasks. First, we propose a spatio-temporal DRL algorithm based on the recurrent neural network and attention mechanism to prove that capturing spatio-temporal traffic features is the key factor to the effectiveness and safety of a DRL-augment AD system. We then design a spatial-temporal Trojan attack on DRL policies, where the trigger is hidden in a sequence of spatial and temporal traffic features, rather than a single instant state used in existing Trojan on SL and DRL tasks. With our Trojan, the adversary acts as a surrounding normal vehicle and can trigger attacks via specific spatial-temporal driving behaviors, rather than physical or wireless access. Through extensive experiments, we show that while capturing spatio-temporal traffic features can improve the performance of DRL for different AD tasks, they suffer from Trojan attacks since our designed Trojan shows high stealthy (various spatio-temporal trigger patterns), effective (less than 3.1\% performance variance rate and more than 98.5\% attack success rate), and sustainable to existing advanced defenses.
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has made significant achievements in many real-world applications. But these real-world applications typically can only provide partial observations for making decisions due to occlusions and noisy sensors. However, partial state observability can be used to hide malicious behaviors for backdoors. In this paper, we explore the sequential nature of DRL and propose a novel temporal-pattern backdoor attack to DRL, whose trigger is a set of temporal constraints on a sequence of observations rather than a single observation, and effect can be kept in a controllable duration rather than in the instant. We validate our proposed backdoor attack to a typical job scheduling task in cloud computing. Numerous experimental results show that our backdoor can achieve excellent effectiveness, stealthiness, and sustainability. Our backdoor's average clean data accuracy and attack success rate can reach 97.8% and 97.5%, respectively.