EViT: Privacy-Preserving Image Retrieval via Encrypted Vision Transformer in Cloud Computing

Image retrieval systems help users to browse and search among extensive images in real-time. With the rise of cloud computing, retrieval tasks are usually outsourced to cloud servers. However, the cloud scenario brings a daunting challenge of privacy protection as cloud servers cannot be fully trusted. To this end, image-encryption-based privacy-preserving image retrieval schemes have been developed, which first extract features from cipher-images, and then build retrieval models based on these features. Yet, most existing approaches extract shallow features and design trivial retrieval models, resulting in insufficient expressiveness for the cipher-images. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm named Encrypted Vision Transformer (EViT), which advances the discriminative representations capability of cipher-images. First, in order to capture comprehensive ruled information, we extract multi-level local length sequence and global Huffman-code frequency features from the cipher-images which are encrypted by stream cipher during JPEG compression process. Second, we design the Vision Transformer-based retrieval model to couple with the multi-level features, and propose two adaptive data augmentation methods to improve representation power of the retrieval model. Our proposal can be easily adapted to unsupervised and supervised settings via self-supervised contrastive learning manner. Extensive experiments reveal that EViT achieves both excellent encryption and retrieval performance, outperforming current schemes in terms of retrieval accuracy by large margins while protecting image privacy effectively. Code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/onlinehuazai/EViT}.

Fraud Detection Using Optimized Machine Learning Tools Under Imbalance Classes

Fraud detection is a challenging task due to the changing nature of fraud patterns over time and the limited availability of fraud examples to learn such sophisticated patterns. Thus, fraud detection with the aid of smart versions of machine learning (ML) tools is essential to assure safety. Fraud detection is a primary ML classification task; however, the optimum performance of the corresponding ML tool relies on the usage of the best hyperparameter values. Moreover, classification under imbalanced classes is quite challenging as it causes poor performance in minority classes, which most ML classification techniques ignore. Thus, we investigate four state-of-the-art ML techniques, namely, logistic regression, decision trees, random forest, and extreme gradient boost, that are suitable for handling imbalance classes to maximize precision and simultaneously reduce false positives. First, these classifiers are trained on two original benchmark unbalanced fraud detection datasets, namely, phishing website URLs and fraudulent credit card transactions. Then, three synthetically balanced datasets are produced for each original data set by implementing the sampling frameworks, namely, RandomUnderSampler, SMOTE, and SMOTEENN. The optimum hyperparameters for all the 16 experiments are revealed using the method RandomzedSearchCV. The validity of the 16 approaches in the context of fraud detection is compared using two benchmark performance metrics, namely, area under the curve of receiver operating characteristics (AUC ROC) and area under the curve of precision and recall (AUC PR). For both phishing website URLs and credit card fraud transaction datasets, the results indicate that extreme gradient boost trained on the original data shows trustworthy performance in the imbalanced dataset and manages to outperform the other three methods in terms of both AUC ROC and AUC PR.

DropNet: Reducing Neural Network Complexity via Iterative Pruning

Modern deep neural networks require a significant amount of computing time and power to train and deploy, which limits their usage on edge devices. Inspired by the iterative weight pruning in the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis, we propose DropNet, an iterative pruning method which prunes nodes/filters to reduce network complexity. DropNet iteratively removes nodes/filters with the lowest average post-activation value across all training samples. Empirically, we show that DropNet is robust across diverse scenarios, including MLPs and CNNs using the MNIST, CIFAR-10 and Tiny ImageNet datasets. We show that up to 90% of the nodes/filters can be removed without any significant loss of accuracy. The final pruned network performs well even with reinitialization of the weights and biases. DropNet also has similar accuracy to an oracle which greedily removes nodes/filters one at a time to minimise training loss, highlighting its effectiveness.

TMGAN-PLC: Audio Packet Loss Concealment using Temporal Memory Generative Adversarial Network

Real-time communications in packet-switched networks have become widely used in daily communication, while they inevitably suffer from network delays and data losses in constrained real-time conditions. To solve these problems, audio packet loss concealment (PLC) algorithms have been developed to mitigate voice transmission failures by reconstructing the lost information. Limited by the transmission latency and device memory, it is still intractable for PLC to accomplish high-quality voice reconstruction using a relatively small packet buffer. In this paper, we propose a temporal memory generative adversarial network for audio PLC, dubbed TMGAN-PLC, which is comprised of a novel nested-UNet generator and the time-domain/frequency-domain discriminators. Specifically, a combination of the nested-UNet and temporal feature-wise linear modulation is elaborately devised in the generator to finely adjust the intra-frame information and establish inter-frame temporal dependencies. To complement the missing speech content caused by longer loss bursts, we employ multi-stage gated vector quantizers to capture the correct content and reconstruct the near-real smooth audio. Extensive experiments on the PLC Challenge dataset demonstrate that the proposed method yields promising performance in terms of speech quality, intelligibility, and PLCMOS.

iExam: A Novel Online Exam Monitoring and Analysis System Based on Face Detection and Recognition

Online exams via video conference software like Zoom have been adopted in many schools due to COVID-19. While it is convenient, it is challenging for teachers to supervise online exams from simultaneously displayed student Zoom windows. In this paper, we propose iExam, an intelligent online exam monitoring and analysis system that can not only use face detection to assist invigilators in real-time student identification, but also be able to detect common abnormal behaviors (including face disappearing, rotating faces, and replacing with a different person during the exams) via a face recognition-based post-exam video analysis. To build such a novel system in its first kind, we overcome three challenges. First, we discover a lightweight approach to capturing exam video streams and analyzing them in real time. Second, we utilize the left-corner names that are displayed on each student's Zoom window and propose an improved OCR (optical character recognition) technique to automatically gather the ground truth for the student faces with dynamic positions. Third, we perform several experimental comparisons and optimizations to efficiently shorten the training and testing time required on teachers' PC. Our evaluation shows that iExam achieves high accuracy, 90.4% for real-time face detection and 98.4% for post-exam face recognition, while maintaining acceptable runtime performance. We have made iExam's source code available at https://github.com/VPRLab/iExam.

Model-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning with Time-Varying State and Control Constraints: An Application to Intelligent Vehicles

Recently, barrier function-based safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence guarantees. Also, few works have addressed the safe RL algorithm design under time-varying safety constraints. This paper proposes a model-based safe RL algorithm for optimal control of nonlinear systems with time-varying state and control constraints. In the proposed approach, we construct a novel barrier-based control policy structure that can guarantee control safety. A multi-step policy evaluation mechanism is proposed to predict the policy's safety risk under time-varying safety constraints and guide the policy to update safely. Theoretical results on stability and robustness are proven. Also, the convergence of the actor-critic learning algorithm is analyzed. The performance of the proposed algorithm outperforms several state-of-the-art RL algorithms in the simulated Safety Gym environment. Furthermore, the approach is applied to the integrated path following and collision avoidance problem for two real-world intelligent vehicles. A differential-drive vehicle and an Ackermann-drive one are used to verify the offline deployment performance and the online learning performance, respectively. Our approach shows an impressive sim-to-real transfer capability and a satisfactory online control performance in the experiment.

See Finer, See More: Implicit Modality Alignment for Text-based Person Retrieval

Text-based person retrieval aims to find the query person based on a textual description. The key is to learn a common latent space mapping between visual-textual modalities. To achieve this goal, existing works employ segmentation to obtain explicitly cross-modal alignments or utilize attention to explore salient alignments. These methods have two shortcomings: 1) Labeling cross-modal alignments are time-consuming. 2) Attention methods can explore salient cross-modal alignments but may ignore some subtle and valuable pairs. To relieve these issues, we introduce an Implicit Visual-Textual (IVT) framework for text-based person retrieval. Different from previous models, IVT utilizes a single network to learn representation for both modalities, which contributes to the visual-textual interaction. To explore the fine-grained alignment, we further propose two implicit semantic alignment paradigms: multi-level alignment (MLA) and bidirectional mask modeling (BMM). The MLA module explores finer matching at sentence, phrase, and word levels, while the BMM module aims to mine \textbf{more} semantic alignments between visual and textual modalities. Extensive experiments are carried out to evaluate the proposed IVT on public datasets, i.e., CUHK-PEDES, RSTPReID, and ICFG-PEDES. Even without explicit body part alignment, our approach still achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/TencentYoutuResearch/PersonRetrieval-IVT.

Joint optimal beamforming and power control in cell-free massive MIMO

We derive a fast and optimal algorithm for solving practical weighted max-min SINR problems in cell-free massive MIMO networks. For the first time, the optimization problem jointly covers long-term power control and distributed beamforming design under imperfect cooperation. In particular, we consider user-centric clusters of access points cooperating on the basis of possibly limited channel state information sharing. Our optimal algorithm merges powerful power control tools based on interference calculus with the recently developed team theoretic framework for distributed beamforming design. In addition, we propose a variation that shows faster convergence in practice.

Time Series Prediction about Air Quality using LSTM-Based Models: A Systematic Mapping

This systematic mapping study investigates the use of Long short-term memory networks to predict time series data about air quality, trying to understand the reasons, characteristics and methods available in the scientific literature, identify gaps in the researched area and potential approaches that can be exploited on later studies.

MegaPortraits: One-shot Megapixel Neural Head Avatars

In this work, we advance the neural head avatar technology to the megapixel resolution while focusing on the particularly challenging task of cross-driving synthesis, i.e., when the appearance of the driving image is substantially different from the animated source image. We propose a set of new neural architectures and training methods that can leverage both medium-resolution video data and high-resolution image data to achieve the desired levels of rendered image quality and generalization to novel views and motion. We demonstrate that suggested architectures and methods produce convincing high-resolution neural avatars, outperforming the competitors in the cross-driving scenario. Lastly, we show how a trained high-resolution neural avatar model can be distilled into a lightweight student model which runs in real-time and locks the identities of neural avatars to several dozens of pre-defined source images. Real-time operation and identity lock are essential for many practical applications head avatar systems.