Early wildfire detection in remote and forest areas is crucial for minimizing devastation and preserving ecosystems. Autonomous drones offer agile access to remote, challenging terrains, equipped with advanced imaging technology that delivers both high-temporal and detailed spatial resolution, making them valuable assets in the early detection and monitoring of wildfires. However, the limited computation and battery resources of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) pose significant challenges in implementing robust and efficient image classification models. Current works in this domain often operate offline, emphasizing the need for solutions that can perform inference in real time, given the constraints of UAVs. To address these challenges, this paper aims to develop a real-time image classification and fire segmentation model. It presents a comprehensive investigation into hardware acceleration using the Jetson Nano P3450 and the implications of TensorRT, NVIDIA's high-performance deep-learning inference library, on fire classification accuracy and speed. The study includes implementations of Quantization Aware Training (QAT), Automatic Mixed Precision (AMP), and post-training mechanisms, comparing them against the latest baselines for fire segmentation and classification. All experiments utilize the FLAME dataset - an image dataset collected by low-altitude drones during a prescribed forest fire. This work contributes to the ongoing efforts to enable real-time, on-board wildfire detection capabilities for UAVs, addressing speed and the computational and energy constraints of these crucial monitoring systems. The results show a 13% increase in classification speed compared to similar models without hardware optimization. Comparatively, loss and accuracy are within 1.225% of the original values.
Datasets encountered in scientific and engineering applications appear in complex formats (e.g., images, multivariate time series, molecules, video, text strings, networks). Graph theory provides a unifying framework to model such datasets and enables the use of powerful tools that can help analyze, visualize, and extract value from data. In this work, we present PlasmoData.jl, an open-source, Julia framework that uses concepts of graph theory to facilitate the modeling and analysis of complex datasets. The core of our framework is a general data modeling abstraction, which we call a DataGraph. We show how the abstraction and software implementation can be used to represent diverse data objects as graphs and to enable the use of tools from topology, graph theory, and machine learning (e.g., graph neural networks) to conduct a variety of tasks. We illustrate the versatility of the framework by using real datasets: i) an image classification problem using topological data analysis to extract features from the graph model to train machine learning models; ii) a disease outbreak problem where we model multivariate time series as graphs to detect abnormal events; and iii) a technology pathway analysis problem where we highlight how we can use graphs to navigate connectivity. Our discussion also highlights how PlasmoData.jl leverages native Julia capabilities to enable compact syntax, scalable computations, and interfaces with diverse packages.
Honey bees pollinate about one-third of the world's food supply, but bee colonies have alarmingly declined by nearly 40% over the past decade due to several factors, including pesticides and pests. Traditional methods for monitoring beehives, such as human inspection, are subjective, disruptive, and time-consuming. To overcome these limitations, artificial intelligence has been used to assess beehive health. However, previous studies have lacked an end-to-end solution and primarily relied on data from a single source, either bee images or sounds. This study introduces a comprehensive system consisting of bee object detection and health evaluation. Additionally, it utilized a combination of visual and audio signals to analyze bee behaviors. An Attention-based Multimodal Neural Network (AMNN) was developed to adaptively focus on key features from each type of signal for accurate bee health assessment. The AMNN achieved an overall accuracy of 92.61%, surpassing eight existing single-signal Convolutional Neural Networks and Recurrent Neural Networks. It outperformed the best image-based model by 32.51% and the top sound-based model by 13.98% while maintaining efficient processing times. Furthermore, it improved prediction robustness, attaining an F1-score higher than 90% across all four evaluated health conditions. The study also shows that audio signals are more reliable than images for assessing bee health. By seamlessly integrating AMNN with image and sound data in a comprehensive bee health monitoring system, this approach provides a more efficient and non-invasive solution for the early detection of bee diseases and the preservation of bee colonies.
Rigorousness and clarity are both essential for interpretations of DNNs to engender human trust. Path methods are commonly employed to generate rigorous attributions that satisfy three axioms. However, the meaning of attributions remains ambiguous due to distinct path choices. To address the ambiguity, we introduce \textbf{Concentration Principle}, which centrally allocates high attributions to indispensable features, thereby endowing aesthetic and sparsity. We then present \textbf{SAMP}, a model-agnostic interpreter, which efficiently searches the near-optimal path from a pre-defined set of manipulation paths. Moreover, we propose the infinitesimal constraint (IC) and momentum strategy (MS) to improve the rigorousness and optimality. Visualizations show that SAMP can precisely reveal DNNs by pinpointing salient image pixels. We also perform quantitative experiments and observe that our method significantly outperforms the counterparts. Code: https://github.com/zbr17/SAMP.
Computational efficiency and adversarial robustness are critical factors in real-world engineering applications. Yet, conventional neural networks often fall short in addressing both simultaneously, or even separately. Drawing insights from natural physical systems and existing literature, it is known that an input convex architecture enhances computational efficiency, while a Lipschitz-constrained architecture bolsters adversarial robustness. By leveraging the strengths of convexity and Lipschitz continuity, we develop a novel network architecture, termed Input Convex Lipschitz Recurrent Neural Networks. This model outperforms existing recurrent units across a spectrum of engineering tasks in terms of computational efficiency and adversarial robustness. These tasks encompass a benchmark MNIST image classification, real-world solar irradiance prediction for Solar PV system planning at LHT Holdings in Singapore, and real-time Model Predictive Control optimization for a chemical reactor.
Recent developments in text-to-image models, particularly Stable Diffusion, have marked significant achievements in various applications. With these advancements, there are growing safety concerns about the vulnerability of the model that malicious entities exploit to generate targeted harmful images. However, the existing methods in the vulnerability of the model mainly evaluate the alignment between the prompt and generated images, but fall short in revealing the vulnerability associated with targeted image generation. In this study, we formulate the problem of targeted adversarial attack on Stable Diffusion and propose a framework to generate adversarial prompts. Specifically, we design a gradient-based embedding optimization method to craft reliable adversarial prompts that guide stable diffusion to generate specific images. Furthermore, after obtaining successful adversarial prompts, we reveal the mechanisms that cause the vulnerability of the model. Extensive experiments on two targeted attack tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in targeted attacks. The code can be obtained in https://github.com/datar001/Revealing-Vulnerabilities-in-Stable-Diffusion-via-Targeted-Attacks.
Recent deep-learning-based single image super-resolution (SISR) methods have shown impressive performance whereas typical methods train their networks by minimizing the pixel-wise distance with respect to a given high-resolution (HR) image. However, despite the basic training scheme being the predominant choice, its use in the context of ill-posed inverse problems has not been thoroughly investigated. In this work, we aim to provide a better comprehension of the underlying constituent by decomposing target HR images into two subcomponents: (1) the optimal centroid which is the expectation over multiple potential HR images, and (2) the inherent noise defined as the residual between the HR image and the centroid. Our findings show that the current training scheme cannot capture the ill-posed nature of SISR and becomes vulnerable to the inherent noise term, especially during early training steps. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel optimization method that can effectively remove the inherent noise term in the early steps of vanilla training by estimating the optimal centroid and directly optimizing toward the estimation. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively enhance the stability of vanilla training, leading to overall performance gain. Codes are available at github.com/2minkyulee/ECO.
Stride determines the distance between adjacent filter positions as the filter moves across the input. A fixed stride causes important information contained in the image can not be captured, so that important information is not classified. Therefore, in previous research, the DiffStride Method was applied, namely the Strided Convolution Method with which it can learn its own stride value. Severe Quantization and a constraining lower bound on preserved information are arises with Max Pooling Downsampling Method. Spectral Pooling reduce the constraint lower bound on preserved information by cutting off the representation in the frequency domain. In this research a CNN Model is proposed with the Downsampling Learnable Stride Technique performed by Backpropagation combined with the Spectral Pooling Technique. Diffstride and Spectral Pooling techniques are expected to maintain most of the information contained in the image. In this study, we compare the Hybrid Method, which is a combined implementation of Spectral Pooling and DiffStride against the Baseline Method, which is the DiffStride implementation on ResNet 18. The accuracy result of the DiffStride combination with Spectral Pooling improves over DiffStride which is baseline method by 0.0094. This shows that the Hybrid Method can maintain most of the information by cutting of the representation in the frequency domain and determine the stride of the learning result through Backpropagation.
Finetuning a pretrained vision model (PVM) is a common technique for learning downstream vision tasks. The conventional finetuning process with the randomly sampled data points results in diminished training efficiency. To address this drawback, we propose a novel approach, VLM-empowered Collaborative Active Finetuning (VeCAF). VeCAF optimizes a parametric data selection model by incorporating the training objective of the model being tuned. Effectively, this guides the PVM towards the performance goal with improved data and computational efficiency. As vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved significant advancements by establishing a robust connection between image and language domains, we exploit the inherent semantic richness of the text embedding space and utilize text embedding of pretrained VLM models to augment PVM image features for better data selection and finetuning. Furthermore, the flexibility of text-domain augmentation gives VeCAF a unique ability to handle out-of-distribution scenarios without external augmented data. Extensive experiments show the leading performance and high efficiency of VeCAF that is superior to baselines in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution image classification tasks. On ImageNet, VeCAF needs up to 3.3x less training batches to reach the target performance compared to full finetuning and achieves 2.8% accuracy improvement over SOTA methods with the same number of batches.
Autoregressive and diffusion models drive the recent breakthroughs on text-to-image generation. Despite their huge success of generating high-realistic images, a common shortcoming of these models is their high inference latency - autoregressive models run more than a thousand times successively to produce image tokens and diffusion models convert Gaussian noise into images with many hundreds of denoising steps. In this work, we explore non-autoregressive text-to-image models that efficiently generate hundreds of image tokens in parallel. We develop many model variations with different learning and inference strategies, initialized text encoders, etc. Compared with autoregressive baselines that needs to run one thousand times, our model only runs 16 times to generate images of competitive quality with an order of magnitude lower inference latency. Our non-autoregressive model with 346M parameters generates an image of 256$\times$256 with about one second on one V100 GPU.