Mitigate Bias in Face Recognition using Skewness-Aware Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Racial equality is an important theme of international human rights law, but it has been largely obscured when the overall face recognition accuracy is pursued blindly. More facts indicate racial bias indeed degrades the fairness of recognition system and the error rates on non-Caucasians are usually much higher than Caucasians. To encourage fairness, we introduce the idea of adaptive margin to learn balanced performance for different races based on large margin losses. A reinforcement learning based race balance network (RL-RBN) is proposed. We formulate the process of finding the optimal margins for non-Caucasians as a Markov decision process and employ deep Q-learning to learn policies for an agent to select appropriate margin by approximating the Q-value function. Guided by the agent, the skewness of feature scatter between races can be reduced. Besides, we provide two ethnicity aware training datasets, called BUPT-Globalface and BUPT-Balancedface dataset, which can be utilized to study racial bias from both data and algorithm aspects. Extensive experiments on RFW database show that RL-RBN successfully mitigates racial bias and learns more balanced performance for different races.

Consistent Instance False Positive Improves Fairness in Face Recognition

Abstract: Demographic bias is a significant challenge in practical face recognition systems. Existing methods heavily rely on accurate demographic annotations. However, such annotations are usually unavailable in real scenarios. Moreover, these methods are typically designed for a specific demographic group and are not general enough. In this paper, we propose a false positive rate penalty loss, which mitigates face recognition bias by increasing the consistency of instance False Positive Rate (FPR). Specifically, we first define the instance FPR as the ratio between the number of the non-target similarities above a unified threshold and the total number of the non-target similarities. The unified threshold is estimated for a given total FPR. Then, an additional penalty term, which is in proportion to the ratio of instance FPR overall FPR, is introduced into the denominator of the softmax-based loss. The larger the instance FPR, the larger the penalty. By such unequal penalties, the instance FPRs are supposed to be consistent. Compared with the previous debiasing methods, our method requires no demographic annotations. Thus, it can mitigate the bias among demographic groups divided by various attributes, and these attributes are not needed to be previously predefined during training. Extensive experimental results on popular benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art competitors. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/Tencent/TFace.

Fair Attribute Classification through Latent Space De-biasing

Abstract: Fairness in visual recognition is becoming a prominent and critical topic of discussion as recognition systems are deployed at scale in the real world. Models trained from data in which target labels are correlated with protected attributes (e.g., gender, race) are known to learn and exploit those correlations. In this work, we introduce a method for training accurate target classifiers while mitigating biases that stem from these correlations. We use GANs to generate realistic-looking images, and perturb these images in the underlying latent space to generate training data that is balanced for each protected attribute. We augment the original dataset with this generated data, and empirically demonstrate that target classifiers trained on the augmented dataset exhibit a number of both quantitative and qualitative benefits. We conduct a thorough evaluation across multiple target labels and protected attributes in the CelebA dataset, and provide an in-depth analysis and comparison to existing literature in the space. Code can be found at https://github.com/princetonvisualai/gan-debiasing.

Fair Feature Distillation for Visual Recognition

Abstract: Fairness is becoming an increasingly crucial issue for computer vision, especially in the human-related decision systems. However, achieving algorithmic fairness, which makes a model produce indiscriminative outcomes against protected groups, is still an unresolved problem. In this paper, we devise a systematic approach which reduces algorithmic biases via feature distillation for visual recognition tasks, dubbed as MMD-based Fair Distillation (MFD). While the distillation technique has been widely used in general to improve the prediction accuracy, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no explicit work that also tries to improve fairness via distillation. Furthermore, We give a theoretical justification of our MFD on the effect of knowledge distillation and fairness. Throughout the extensive experiments, we show our MFD significantly mitigates the bias against specific minorities without any loss of the accuracy on both synthetic and real-world face datasets.

EnD: Entangling and Disentangling deep representations for bias correction

Abstract: Artificial neural networks perform state-of-the-art in an ever-growing number of tasks, and nowadays they are used to solve an incredibly large variety of tasks. There are problems, like the presence of biases in the training data, which question the generalization capability of these models. In this work we propose EnD, a regularization strategy whose aim is to prevent deep models from learning unwanted biases. In particular, we insert an "information bottleneck" at a certain point of the deep neural network, where we dis-entangle the information about the bias, still letting the useful information for the training task forward-propagating in the rest of the model. One big advantage of EnD is that it does not require additional training complexity (like de-coders or extra layers in the model), since it is a regularizer directly applied on the trained model. Our experiments show that EnD effectively improves the generalization on unbiased test sets, and it can be effectively applied on real-case scenarios, like removing hidden biases in the COVID-19 detection from radiographic images.

Mitigating Face Recognition Bias via Group Adaptive Classifier

Abstract: Face recognition is known to exhibit bias - subjects in a certain demographic group can be better recognized than other groups. This work aims to learn a fair face representation, where faces of every group could be more equally represented. Our proposed group adaptive classifier mitigates bias by using adaptive convolution kernels and attention mechanisms on faces based on their demographic attributes. The adaptive module comprises kernel masks and channel-wise attention maps for each demographic group so as to activate different facial regions for identification, leading to more discriminative features pertinent to their demographics. Our introduced automated adaptation strategy determines whether to apply adaptation to a certain layer by iteratively computing the dissimilarity among demographic-adaptive parameters. A new de-biasing loss function is proposed to mitigate the gap of average intra-class distance between demographic groups. Experiments on face benchmarks (RFW, LFW, IJB-A, and IJB-C) show that our work is able to mitigate face recognition bias across demographic groups while maintaining the competitive accuracy.

Fairness-aware Adversarial Perturbation Towards Bias Mitigation for Deployed Deep Models

Abstract: Prioritizing fairness is of central importance in artificial intelligence (AI) systems, especially for those societal applications, e.g., hiring systems should recommend applicants equally from different demographic groups, and risk assessment systems must eliminate racism in criminal justice. Existing efforts towards the ethical development of AI systems have leveraged data science to mitigate biases in the training set or introduced fairness principles into the training process. For a deployed AI system, however, it may not allow for retraining or tuning in practice. By contrast, we propose a more flexible approach, i.e., fairness-aware adversarial perturbation (FAAP), which learns to perturb input data to blind deployed models on fairness-related features, e.g., gender and ethnicity. The key advantage is that FAAP does not modify deployed models in terms of parameters and structures. To achieve this, we design a discriminator to distinguish fairness-related attributes based on latent representations from deployed models. Meanwhile, a perturbation generator is trained against the discriminator, such that no fairness-related features could be extracted from perturbed inputs. Exhaustive experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness and superior performance of the proposed FAAP. In addition, FAAP is validated on real-world commercial deployments (inaccessible to model parameters), which shows the transferability of FAAP, foreseeing the potential of black-box adaptation.

Fair Contrastive Learning for Facial Attribute Classification

Abstract: Learning visual representation of high quality is essential for image classification. Recently, a series of contrastive representation learning methods have achieved preeminent success. Particularly, SupCon outperformed the dominant methods based on cross-entropy loss in representation learning. However, we notice that there could be potential ethical risks in supervised contrastive learning. In this paper, we for the first time analyze unfairness caused by supervised contrastive learning and propose a new Fair Supervised Contrastive Loss (FSCL) for fair visual representation learning. Inheriting the philosophy of supervised contrastive learning, it encourages representation of the same class to be closer to each other than that of different classes, while ensuring fairness by penalizing the inclusion of sensitive attribute information in representation. In addition, we introduce a group-wise normalization to diminish the disparities of intra-group compactness and inter-class separability between demographic groups that arouse unfair classification. Through extensive experiments on CelebA and UTK Face, we validate that the proposed method significantly outperforms SupCon and existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of the trade-off between top-1 accuracy and fairness. Moreover, our method is robust to the intensity of data bias and effectively works in incomplete supervised settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/sungho-CoolG/FSCL.

Leveling Down in Computer Vision: Pareto Inefficiencies in Fair Deep Classifiers

Abstract: Algorithmic fairness is frequently motivated in terms of a trade-off in which overall performance is decreased so as to improve performance on disadvantaged groups where the algorithm would otherwise be less accurate. Contrary to this, we find that applying existing fairness approaches to computer vision improve fairness by degrading the performance of classifiers across all groups (with increased degradation on the best performing groups). Extending the bias-variance decomposition for classification to fairness, we theoretically explain why the majority of fairness classifiers designed for low capacity models should not be used in settings involving high-capacity models, a scenario common to computer vision. We corroborate this analysis with extensive experimental support that shows that many of the fairness heuristics used in computer vision also degrade performance on the most disadvantaged groups. Building on these insights, we propose an adaptive augmentation strategy that, uniquely, of all methods tested, improves performance for the disadvantaged groups.

Learning Fair Classifiers with Partially Annotated Group Labels

Abstract: Recently, fairness-aware learning have become increasingly crucial, but most of those methods operate by assuming the availability of fully annotated demographic group labels. We emphasize that such assumption is unrealistic for real-world applications since group label annotations are expensive and can conflict with privacy issues. In this paper, we consider a more practical scenario, dubbed as Algorithmic Group Fairness with the Partially annotated Group labels (Fair-PG). We observe that the existing methods to achieve group fairness perform even worse than the vanilla training, which simply uses full data only with target labels, under Fair-PG. To address this problem, we propose a simple Confidence-based Group Label assignment (CGL) strategy that is readily applicable to any fairness-aware learning method. CGL utilizes an auxiliary group classifier to assign pseudo group labels, where random labels are assigned to low confident samples. We first theoretically show that our method design is better than the vanilla pseudo-labeling strategy in terms of fairness criteria. Then, we empirically show on several benchmark datasets that by combining CGL and the state-of-the-art fairness-aware in-processing methods, the target accuracies and the fairness metrics can be jointly improved compared to the baselines. Furthermore, we convincingly show that CGL enables to naturally augment the given group-labeled dataset with external target label-only datasets so that both accuracy and fairness can be improved. Code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/cgl_fairness.

Learning Bias-Invariant Representation by Cross-Sample Mutual Information Minimization

Abstract: Deep learning algorithms mine knowledge from the training data and thus would likely inherit the dataset’s bias information. As a result, the obtained model would generalize poorly and even mislead the decision process in real-life applications. We propose to remove the bias information misused by the target task with a crosssample adversarial debiasing (CSAD) method. CSAD explicitly extracts target and bias features disentangled from the latent representation generated by a feature extractor and then learns to discover and remove the correlation between the target and bias features. The correlation measurement plays a critical role in adversarial debiasing and is conducted by a cross-sample neural mutual information estimator. Moreover, we propose joint content and local structural representation learning to boost mutual information estimation for better performance. We conduct thorough experiments on publicly available datasets to validate the advantages of the proposed method over state-of-the-art approaches.

Understanding and Mitigating Annotation Bias in Facial Expression Recognition

Abstract: The performance of a computer vision model depends on the size and quality of its training data. Recent studies have unveiled previously-unknown composition biases in common image datasets which then lead to skewed model outputs, and have proposed methods to mitigate these biases. However, most existing works assume that human-generated annotations can be considered gold-standard and unbiased. In this paper, we reveal that this assumption can be problematic, and that special care should be taken to prevent models from learning such annotation biases. We focus on facial expression recognition and compare the label biases between lab-controlled and in-the-wild datasets. We demonstrate that many expression datasets contain significant annotation biases between genders, especially when it comes to the happy and angry expressions, and that traditional methods cannot fully mitigate such biases in trained models. To remove expression annotation bias, we propose an AU-Calibrated Facial Expression Recognition (AUC-FER) framework that utilizes facial action units (AUs) and incorporates the triplet loss into the objective function. Experimental results suggest that the proposed method is more effective in removing expression annotation bias than existing techniques.

PASS: Protected Attribute Suppression System for Mitigating Bias in Face Recognition

Abstract: Face recognition networks encode information about sensitive attributes while being trained for identity classification. Such encoding has two major issues: (a) it makes the face representations susceptible to privacy leakage (b) it appears to contribute to bias in face recognition. However, existing bias mitigation approaches generally require end-to-end training and are unable to achieve high verification accuracy. Therefore, we present a descriptor-based adversarial de-biasing approach called ‘Protected Attribute Suppression System (PASS)’. PASS can be trained on top of descriptors obtained from any previously trained high-performing network to classify identities and simultaneously reduce encoding of sensitive attributes. This eliminates the need for end-to-end training. As a component of PASS, we present a novel discriminator training strategy that discourages a network from encoding protected attribute information. We show the efficacy of PASS to reduce gender and skintone information in descriptors from SOTA face recognition networks like Arcface. As a result, PASS descriptors outperform existing baselines in reducing gender and skintone bias on the IJB-C dataset, while maintaining a high verification accuracy.

Understanding and Evaluating Racial Biases in Image Captioning

Abstract: Image captioning is an important task for benchmarking visual reasoning and for enabling accessibility for people with vision impairments. However, as in many machine learning settings, social biases can influence image captioning in undesirable ways. In this work, we study bias propagation pathways within image captioning, focusing specifically on the COCO dataset. Prior work has analyzed gender bias in captions using automatically-derived gender labels; here we examine racial and intersectional biases using manual annotations. Our first contribution is in annotating the perceived gender and skin color of 28,315 of the depicted people after obtaining IRB approval. Using these annotations, we compare racial biases present in both manual and automatically-generated image captions. We demonstrate differences in caption performance, sentiment, and word choice between images of lighter versus darker-skinned people. Further, we find the magnitude of these differences to be greater in modern captioning systems compared to older ones, thus leading to concerns that without proper consideration and mitigation these differences will only become increasingly prevalent. Code and data is available at https://princetonvisualai.github.io/imagecaptioning-bias .

Towards causal benchmarking of bias in face analysis algorithms

Abstract: Measuring algorithmic bias is crucial both to assess algorithmic fairness, and to guide the improvement of algorithms. Current methods to measure algorithmic bias in computer vision, which are based on observational datasets, are inadequate for this task because they conflate algorithmic bias with dataset bias. To address this problem we develop an experimental method for measuring algorithmic bias of face analysis algorithms, which manipulates directly the attributes of interest, e.g., gender and skin tone, in order to reveal causal links between attribute variation and performance change. Our proposed method is based on generating synthetic ``transects'' of matched sample images that are designed to differ along specific attributes while leaving other attributes constant. A crucial aspect of our approach is relying on the perception of human observers, both to guide manipulations, and to measure algorithmic bias. Besides allowing the measurement of algorithmic bias, synthetic transects have other advantages with respect to observational datasets: they sample attributes more evenly allowing for more straightforward bias analysis on minority and intersectional groups, they enable prediction of bias in new scenarios, they greatly reduce ethical and legal challenges, and they are economical and fast to obtain, helping make bias testing affordable and widely available. We validate our method by comparing it to a study that employs the traditional observational method for analyzing bias in gender classification algorithms. The two methods reach different conclusions. While the observational method reports gender and skin color biases, the experimental method reveals biases due to gender, hair length, age, and facial hair.

FairALM: Augmented Lagrangian Method for Training Fair Models with Little Regret

Abstract: Algorithmic decision making based on computer vision and machine learning technologies continue to permeate our lives. But issues related to biases of these models and the extent to which they treat certain segments of the population unfairly, have led to concern in the general public. It is now accepted that because of biases in the datasets we present to the models, a fairness-oblivious training will lead to unfair models. An interesting topic is the study of mechanisms via which the de novo design or training of the model can be informed by fairness measures. Here, we study mechanisms that impose fairness concurrently while training the model. While existing fairness based approaches in vision have largely relied on training adversarial modules together with the primary classification/regression task, in an effort to remove the influence of the protected attribute or variable, we show how ideas based on well-known optimization concepts can provide a simpler alternative. In our proposed scheme, imposing fairness just requires specifying the protected attribute and utilizing our optimization routine. We provide a detailed technical analysis and present experiments demonstrating that various fairness measures from the literature can be reliably imposed on a number of training tasks in vision in a manner that is interpretable.

Fairness issues in facial recognition.

As mentioned before, the methods of unfairness mitigation can be categorized into pre-processing, in-processing and post-processing. In this section we start with the evaluation of fairness in facial recognition areas and categories methods used for unfairness mitigation by targeting stage. Tab. {{table:893f5e89-6082-40ba-b33e-3ad488ef0496}}  shows all the methods we reviewed.


Wide Residual Networks

Abstract: Deep residual networks were shown to be able to scale up to thousands of layers and still have improving performance. However, each fraction of a percent of improved accuracy costs nearly doubling the number of layers, and so training very deep residual networks has a problem of diminishing feature reuse, which makes these networks very slow to train. To tackle these problems, in this paper we conduct a detailed experimental study on the architecture of ResNet blocks, based on which we propose a novel architecture where we decrease depth and increase width of residual networks. We call the resulting network structures wide residual networks (WRNs) and show that these are far superior over their commonly used thin and very deep counterparts. For example, we demonstrate that even a simple 16-layer-deep wide residual network outperforms in accuracy and efficiency all previous deep residual networks, including thousand-layer-deep networks, achieving new state-of-the-art results on CIFAR, SVHN, COCO, and significant improvements on ImageNet. Our code and models are available at this https URL

Attention is All you Need

Abstract: The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.8 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature. We show that the Transformer generalizes well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.

Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition

Abstract: In this work we investigate the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting. Our main contribution is a thorough evaluation of networks of increasing depth using an architecture with very small (3x3) convolution filters, which shows that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16-19 weight layers. These findings were the basis of our ImageNet Challenge 2014 submission, where our team secured the first and the second places in the localisation and classification tracks respectively. We also show that our representations generalise well to other datasets, where they achieve state-of-the-art results. We have made our two best-performing ConvNet models publicly available to facilitate further research on the use of deep visual representations in computer vision.

Statistics of the models

In our experimental evaluation, we first explore the trade-offs among different objectives (e.g., execution time, memory consumption, and network communication) for popular DNN models by analyzing their cost frontiers. Then we evaluate the accuracy and efficiency of the FT algorithm. We also test the efficiency of the TensorOpt system for distributed DNN training. In our cluster, each machine is equipped with 8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs (with 16 GB on chip memory), a 48-core Initel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8160 CPU and 256 GB main memory. The GPUs on the same machine use NVLink for communication, while GPUs on different machines use RDMA on 100 Gbps EDR Infiniband for communication. Unless otherwise stated, the experiments were conducted using 16 GPUs on two machines. The statistics of the models used in the experiments are listed in Table {{table:206de27a-0b70-48cd-975a-e8643e2e59e9}} , where memory is the estimated peak memory consumption for training on a single GPU.

We evaluated the efficiency of TensorOpt by comparing with Horovod {{cite:68ab3b4}} for training different models with 16 GPUs. Horovod is the state-of-the-art execution engine for data parallelism. We did not compare with ToFu because it is not open source. We also did not compare with MeshTensorFlow because it is hard to tune the parallelism strategy to run since MeshTensorFlow can only set the strategy manually. As OptCNN and FlexFlow are based on Legion, the comparison may not be fair due to the differences in execution engine. Horovod uses data parallelism for training and (in a way similar to TensorOpt) delegates single machine execution to TensorFlow. We used two configurations for TensorOpt, mini-time means minimizing the per-iteration time under the given parallelism, while data parallel uses the same parallelization strategy as Horovod. The Transformer model used in this experiment (with 4.8GB parameter) is smaller than the one in Table {{table:206de27a-0b70-48cd-975a-e8643e2e59e9}}  as Horovod cannot run the large model.


Propagating node hidden features using generalized pagerank methods

Generating a computation graph based on nodes' structural equivalences

Incorporating a learnable homophily degree matrix into a GCN

Utilizing two kernels to capture the homophily and heterophily and selecting the appropriate one for each node pair

Finding global homophily for nodes showing heterophily by learning a coefficient matrix

Adaptive Universal Generalized PageRank Graph Neural Network

Abstract: In many important graph data processing applications the acquired information includes both node features and observations of the graph topology. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are designed to exploit both sources of evidence but they do not optimally trade-off their utility and integrate them in a manner that is also universal. Here, universality refers to independence on homophily or heterophily graph assumptions. We address these issues by introducing a new Generalized PageRank (GPR) GNN architecture that adaptively learns the GPR weights so as to jointly optimize node feature and topological information extraction, regardless of the extent to which the node labels are homophilic or heterophilic. Learned GPR weights automatically adjust to the node label pattern, irrelevant on the type of initialization, and thereby guarantee excellent learning performance for label patterns that are usually hard to handle. Furthermore, they allow one to avoid feature over-smoothing, a process which renders feature information nondiscriminative, without requiring the network to be shallow. Our accompanying theoretical analysis of the GPR-GNN method is facilitated by novel synthetic benchmark datasets generated by the so-called contextual stochastic block model. We also compare the performance of our GNN architecture with that of several state-of-the-art GNNs on the problem of node-classification, using well-known benchmark homophilic and heterophilic datasets. The results demonstrate that GPR-GNN offers significant performance improvement compared to existing techniques on both synthetic and benchmark data.

Breaking the Limit of Graph Neural Networks by Improving the Assortativity of Graphs with Local Mixing Patterns

Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved tremendous success on multiple graph-based learning tasks by fusing network structure and node features. Modern GNN models are built upon iterative aggregation of neighbor's/proximity features by message passing. Its prediction performance has been shown to be strongly bounded by assortative mixing in the graph, a key property wherein nodes with similar attributes mix/connect with each other. We observe that real world networks exhibit heterogeneous or diverse mixing patterns and the conventional global measurement of assortativity, such as global assortativity coefficient, may not be a representative statistic in quantifying this mixing. We adopt a generalized concept, node-level assortativity, one that is based at the node level to better represent the diverse patterns and accurately quantify the learnability of GNNs. We find that the prediction performance of a wide range of GNN models is highly correlated with the node level assortativity. To break this limit, in this work, we focus on transforming the input graph into a computation graph which contains both proximity and structural information as distinct type of edges. The resulted multi-relational graph has an enhanced level of assortativity and, more importantly, preserves rich information from the original graph. We then propose to run GNNs on this computation graph and show that adaptively choosing between structure and proximity leads to improved performance under diverse mixing. Empirically, we show the benefits of adopting our transformation framework for semi-supervised node classification task on a variety of real world graph learning benchmarks.

Graph Neural Networks with Heterophily

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have proven to be useful for many different practical applications. However, many existing GNN models have implicitly assumed homophily among the nodes connected in the graph, and therefore have largely overlooked the important setting of heterophily, where most connected nodes are from different classes. In this work, we propose a novel framework called CPGNN that generalizes GNNs for graphs with either homophily or heterophily. The proposed framework incorporates an interpretable compatibility matrix for modeling the heterophily or homophily level in the graph, which can be learned in an end-to-end fashion, enabling it to go beyond the assumption of strong homophily. Theoretically, we show that replacing the compatibility matrix in our framework with the identity (which represents pure homophily) reduces to GCN. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in more realistic and challenging experimental settings with significantly less training data compared to previous works: CPGNN variants achieve state-of-the-art results in heterophily settings with or without contextual node features, while maintaining comparable performance in homophily settings.

Powerful Graph Convolutioal Networks with Adaptive Propagation Mechanism for Homophily and Heterophily

Abstract: Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been widely applied in various fields due to their significant power on processing graph-structured data. Typical GCN and its variants work under a homophily assumption (i.e., nodes with same class are prone to connect to each other), while ignoring the heterophily which exists in many real-world networks (i.e., nodes with different classes tend to form edges). Existing methods deal with heterophily by mainly aggregating higher-order neighborhoods or combing the immediate representations, which leads to noise and irrelevant information in the result. But these methods did not change the propagation mechanism which works under homophily assumption (that is a fundamental part of GCNs). This makes it difficult to distinguish the representation of nodes from different classes. To address this problem, in this paper we design a novel propagation mechanism, which can automatically change the propagation and aggregation process according to homophily or heterophily between node pairs. To adaptively learn the propagation process, we introduce two measurements of homophily degree between node pairs, which is learned based on topological and attribute information, respectively. Then we incorporate the learnable homophily degree into the graph convolution framework, which is trained in an end-to-end schema, enabling it to go beyond the assumption of homophily. More importantly, we theoretically prove that our model can constrain the similarity of representations between nodes according to their homophily degree. Experiments on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that this new approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under heterophily or low homophily, and gains competitive performance under homophily.

GBK-GNN: Gated Bi-Kernel Graph Neural Networks for Modeling Both Homophily and Heterophily

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used on a variety of graph-based machine learning tasks. For node-level tasks, GNNs have strong power to model the homophily property of graphs (i.e., connected nodes are more similar) while their ability to capture the heterophily property is often doubtful. This is partially caused by the design of the feature transformation with the same kernel for the nodes in the same hop and the followed aggregation operator. One kernel cannot model the similarity and the dissimilarity (i.e., the positive and negative correlation) between node features simultaneously even though we use attention mechanisms like Graph Attention Network (GAT), since the weight calculated by attention is always a positive value. In this paper, we propose a novel GNN model based on a bi-kernel feature transformation and a selection gate. Two kernels capture homophily and heterophily information respectively, and the gate is introduced to select which kernel we should use for the given node pairs. We conduct extensive experiments on various datasets with different homophily-heterophily properties. The experimental results show consistent and significant improvements against state-of-the-art GNN methods.

Finding Global Homophily in Graph Neural Networks When Meeting Heterophily

Abstract: We investigate graph neural networks on graphs with heterophily. Some existing methods amplify a node's neighborhood with multi-hop neighbors to include more nodes with homophily. However, it is a significant challenge to set personalized neighborhood sizes for different nodes. Further, for other homophilous nodes excluded in the neighborhood, they are ignored for information aggregation. To address these problems, we propose two models GloGNN and GloGNN++, which generate a node's embedding by aggregating information from global nodes in the graph. In each layer, both models learn a coefficient matrix to capture the correlations between nodes, based on which neighborhood aggregation is performed. The coefficient matrix allows signed values and is derived from an optimization problem that has a closed-form solution. We further accelerate neighborhood aggregation and derive a linear time complexity. We theoretically explain the models' effectiveness by proving that both the coefficient matrix and the generated node embedding matrix have the desired grouping effect. We conduct extensive experiments to compare our models against 11 other competitors on 15 benchmark datasets in a wide range of domains, scales and graph heterophilies. Experimental results show that our methods achieve superior performance and are also very efficient.

A summary of major solutions proposed to make GNNs suitable for both hemophily and heterophily

Similarly, it has been shown in {{cite:7455be1}} that
the disassortativity of many real-world graphs can lead to the low performance of GNN models on these graphs.
Therefore, this paper proposes to generate a computation graph from the original graph
and then run the GNN on the computation graph.
The computation graph is a multi-relational graph with different types of edges between two nodes based on different levels of neighborhood similarities such as nodes degrees and neighboring nodes degrees.
In {{cite:47c5e46}}, a class compatibility matrix is added into GNNs to improve the performance of GNNs in graphs that heterophily exist.
This framework first estimates a prior belief of every node's class label based on the node features. Then, using a compatibility matrix {{formula:60d15014-7402-46a8-aef6-44791bc4bfcd}} , the prior beliefs of nodes are propagated in their neighborhood. Each element {{formula:caa8d3ed-0e82-45d1-bcb7-4099752cc643}}  in the matrix {{formula:e13ebcfb-09cc-4cfc-aefd-dc28a826200f}}  is the empirical probability that nodes with class label {{formula:da552727-2209-42a1-bc4f-87b36a863ffa}}  connects to nodes with class label {{formula:896ee219-952a-4b82-9a5f-c520eb4cbff2}}  in the dataset. The compatibility matrix which can be learned in this model enables it to go beyond the homophily assumption.
Table {{table:70eed8f5-4032-4011-9c21-e2e8019b7734}}  summarizes some of the major papers that studied the homophily assumption in GNNs.


Generative Visual Manipulation on the Natural Image Manifold

Abstract: Realistic image manipulation is challenging because it requires modifying the image appearance in a user-controlled way, while preserving the realism of the result. Unless the user has considerable artistic skill, it is easy to "fall off" the manifold of natural images while editing. In this paper, we propose to learn the natural image manifold directly from data using a generative adversarial neural network. We then define a class of image editing operations, and constrain their output to lie on that learned manifold at all times. The model automatically adjusts the output keeping all edits as realistic as possible. All our manipulations are expressed in terms of constrained optimization and are applied in near-real time. We evaluate our algorithm on the task of realistic photo manipulation of shape and color. The presented method can further be used for changing one image to look like the other, as well as generating novel imagery from scratch based on user's scribbles.

Deep Photo Style Transfer

Abstract: This paper introduces a deep-learning approach to photographic style transfer that handles a large variety of image content while faithfully transferring the reference style. Our approach builds upon the recent work on painterly transfer that separates style from the content of an image by considering different layers of a neural network. However, as is, this approach is not suitable for photorealistic style transfer. Even when both the input and reference images are photographs, the output still exhibits distortions reminiscent of a painting. Our contribution is to constrain the transformation from the input to the output to be locally affine in colorspace, and to express this constraint as a custom fully differentiable energy term. We show that this approach successfully suppresses distortion and yields satisfying photorealistic style transfers in a broad variety of scenarios, including transfer of the time of day, weather, season, and artistic edits.

Datasets about image transformation tasks

To summarize the datasets on image transformation,
we classify the three dataset types:
aligned between two datasets, unaligned between two datasets and only two image examples without datasets.
Different types of datasets are built for different granularities of image transformation tasks.
The aligned dataset is for image transformation tasks with pixel-level granularity. The unaligned dataset is aimed at target-level granular image transformation tasks. Only two image examples without datasets are often referred to as style transfer, which relates to perception by a human from the image-level granularity.
In Table {{table:bd998255-4bbf-4e33-8b14-e3d9225c3669}} , we summarize some datasets about image transformation tasks.

Independent Learning of image transformation

Independent learning works on the aligned datasets. Much work of the image transformation on the aligned dataset is related to semantic segmentation. Various aligned datasets have been established to solve practical problems in Table {{table:bd998255-4bbf-4e33-8b14-e3d9225c3669}} . A large number of models have been proposed, e.g., Fully Convolutional Networks (FCN) {{cite:8733fcb}} and U-Net {{cite:b2785d5}}. They have a similar structure shown in Fig. {{figure:b7184227-6cbb-408b-b69a-d8b4cf4c40e3}} .
FCN adopts a basic autoencoder to map images to semantic masks through the downsampling to the upsampling.
U-Net also provides an easy but efficient method to locate the pixels of the mask by adding some skip connections from feature extraction to reconstruction.
Based on the IGC learning framework, the student model denotes as {{formula:bd70b2ed-0a0f-42e6-bdda-34cb78c144ff}}  to learn the parameters {{formula:bf760da8-c3fd-4210-be81-bfae012308b0}}  from the labelled dataset.
{{formula:4e7f834c-5929-404d-b8ef-8439548f6b7e}}  is trained using a per-pixel loss between the output and ground-truth image.
A per-pixel loss is defined as follows,
{{formula:a1aa60e2-8331-4400-9ceb-78d4ab9d123d}}

Cooperation Learning of image transformation

Consider the opposite problem of semantic segmentation, converting the semantic mask into a realistic image. This problem can be solved by previous independent learning methods. However, the researchers found that the generated images are vague due to a lack of details. Inspired by GAN which can generate realistic and vivid images, more and more image-to-image translation tasks adopted the conditional GAN. As mentioned in Section REF , conditional GAN is considered a kind of cooperative learning under the framework of IGC learning. At the beginning of the image transformation, the works of cooperative learning are aimed to the aligned dataset. Compared with independent learning, cooperative learning has significantly improved the details of the generated images, e.g., colourization and edge to photo in Table {{table:bd998255-4bbf-4e33-8b14-e3d9225c3669}} . An aligned dataset restricts the applications of the image transformation. Some researchers pay attention to accomplishing the object transformation of images on unaligned datasets.
The survey {{cite:a7de170}} summarizes the methods for two types of datasets in the context of GAN.

PixeltoPixel is a model to solve general image transformation problems in Fig. {{figure:e7a9a0f6-f383-4497-bef9-3028635fdc37}} . PixeltoPixel, a typical conditional GAN, has a generator as image transformation network and an discriminator as a classifier. As shown in Table {{table:bd998255-4bbf-4e33-8b14-e3d9225c3669}} , PixeltoPixel solves some transformation tasks on aligned dataset.

General Image Transformation with Independent Learning

In Table {{table:bd998255-4bbf-4e33-8b14-e3d9225c3669}} , we choose one aligned datasets: CMP Facades. We choose the U-Net as a independent learning model and PixeltoPixel as a cooperative learning model.
The codes https://github.com/junyanz/pytorch-CycleGAN-and-pix2pix
come from the open source library by official.

General Image Transformation with Cooperative Learning

In realistic image scenes, the collected data is often not aligned. For example, we can obtain a bunch of misaligned images through a deep classification network. In this section, we mainly experimented the general image-to-image translation on unaligned data under cooperative learning.
According to Table {{table:bd998255-4bbf-4e33-8b14-e3d9225c3669}} , we choose one unaligned datasets: apple2orange https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~taesung_park/CycleGAN/datasets/apple2orange.zip.
The dataset is collected by {{cite:0269c2f}}. We verify the experiment of the CycleGAN model and discuss its performance and shortcomings.


Topic-Guided Variational Autoencoders for Text Generation

Abstract: We propose a topic-guided variational autoencoder (TGVAE) model for text generation. Distinct from existing variational autoencoder (VAE) based approaches, which assume a simple Gaussian prior for the latent code, our model specifies the prior as a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) parametrized by a neural topic module. Each mixture component corresponds to a latent topic, which provides guidance to generate sentences under the topic. The neural topic module and the VAE-based neural sequence module in our model are learned jointly. In particular, a sequence of invertible Householder transformations is applied to endow the approximate posterior of the latent code with high flexibility during model inference. Experimental results show that our TGVAE outperforms alternative approaches on both unconditional and conditional text generation, which can generate semantically-meaningful sentences with various topics.

Coherent Comment Generation for Chinese Articles with a Graph-to-Sequence Model

Abstract: Automatic article commenting is helpful in encouraging user engagement and interaction on online news platforms. However, the news documents are usually too long for traditional encoder-decoder based models, which often results in general and irrelevant comments. In this paper, we propose to generate comments with a graph-to-sequence model that models the input news as a topic interaction graph. By organizing the article into graph structure, our model can better understand the internal structure of the article and the connection between topics, which makes it better able to understand the story. We collect and release a large scale news-comment corpus from a popular Chinese online news platform Tencent Kuaibao. Extensive experiment results show that our model can generate much more coherent and informative comments compared with several strong baseline models.

Using Local Knowledge Graph Construction to Scale Seq2Seq Models to Multi-Document Inputs

Abstract: Query-based open-domain NLP tasks require information synthesis from long and diverse web results. Current approaches extractively select portions of web text as input to Sequence-to-Sequence models using methods such as TF-IDF ranking. We propose constructing a local graph structured knowledge base for each query, which compresses the web search information and reduces redundancy. We show that by linearizing the graph into a structured input sequence, models can encode the graph representations within a standard Sequence-to-Sequence setting. For two generative tasks with very long text input, long-form question answering and multi-document summarization, feeding graph representations as input can achieve better performance than using retrieved text portions.

Incorporating External Knowledge into Machine Reading for Generative Question Answering

Abstract: Commonsense and background knowledge is required for a QA model to answer many nontrivial questions. Different from existing work on knowledge-aware QA, we focus on a more challenging task of leveraging external knowledge to generate answers in natural language for a given question with context. In this paper, we propose a new neural model, Knowledge-Enriched Answer Generator (KEAG), which is able to compose a natural answer by exploiting and aggregating evidence from all four information sources available: question, passage, vocabulary and knowledge. During the process of answer generation, KEAG adaptively determines when to utilize symbolic knowledge and which fact from the knowledge is useful. This allows the model to exploit external knowledge that is not explicitly stated in the given text, but that is relevant for generating an answer. The empirical study on public benchmark of answer generation demonstrates that KEAG improves answer quality over models without knowledge and existing knowledge-aware models, confirming its effectiveness in leveraging knowledge.

Learning to Select Knowledge for Response Generation in Dialog Systems

Abstract: End-to-end neural models for intelligent dialogue systems suffer from the problem of generating uninformative responses. Various methods were proposed to generate more informative responses by leveraging external knowledge. However,  few previous work has focused on selecting appropriate knowledge in the learning process. The inappropriate selection of knowledge could prohibit the model from learning to make full use of the knowledge. Motivated by this, we propose an end-to-end neural model which employs a novel knowledge selection mechanism where both prior and posterior distributions over knowledge are used to facilitate knowledge selection. Specifically, a posterior distribution over knowledge is inferred from both utterances and responses, and it ensures the appropriate selection of knowledge during the training process. Meanwhile, a prior distribution, which is inferred from utterances only,  is used to approximate the posterior distribution so that appropriate knowledge can be selected even without responses during the inference process. Compared with the previous work, our model can better incorporate appropriate knowledge in response generation. Experiments on both automatic and human evaluation verify the superiority of our model over previous baselines.

A Knowledge-Enhanced Pretraining Model for Commonsense Story Generation

Abstract: Story generation, namely generating a reasonable story from a leading context, is an important but challenging task. In spite of the success in modeling fluency and local coherence, existing neural language generation models (e.g., GPT-2) still suffer from repetition, logic conflicts, and lack of long-range coherence in generated stories. We conjecture that this is because of the difficulty of associating relevant commonsense knowledge, understanding the causal relationships, and planning entities and events with proper temporal order. In this paper, we devise a knowledge-enhanced pretraining model for commonsense story generation. We propose to utilize commonsense knowledge from external knowledge bases to generate reasonable stories. To further capture the causal and temporal dependencies between the sentences in a reasonable story, we employ multi-task learning which combines a discriminative objective to distinguish true and fake stories during fine-tuning. Automatic and manual evaluation shows that our model can generate more reasonable stories than state-of-the-art baselines, particularly in terms of logic and global coherence.

Knowledge Aware Conversation Generation with Reasoning on Augmented Graph

Abstract: Two types of knowledge, factoid knowledge from graphs and non-factoid knowledge from unstructured documents, have been studied for knowledge aware open-domain conversation generation, in which edge information in graphs can help generalization of knowledge selectors, and text sentences of non-factoid knowledge can provide rich information for response generation. Fusion of knowledge triples and sentences might yield mutually reinforcing advantages for conversation generation, but there is less study on that. To address this challenge, we propose a knowledge aware chatting machine with three components, augmented knowledge graph containing both factoid and non-factoid knowledge, knowledge selector, and response generator. For knowledge selection on the graph, we formulate it as a problem of multi-hop graph reasoning that is more flexible in comparison with previous one-hop knowledge selection models. To fully leverage long text information that differentiates our graph from others, we improve a state of the art reasoning algorithm with machine reading comprehension technology. We demonstrate that supported by such unified knowledge and knowledge selection method, our system can generate more appropriate and informative responses than baselines.

Story Ending Generation with Incremental Encoding and Commonsense Knowledge

Abstract: Generating a reasonable ending for a given story context, i.e., story ending generation, is a strong indication of story comprehension. This task requires not only to understand the context clues which play an important role in planning the plot, but also to handle implicit knowledge to make a reasonable, coherent story. In this paper, we devise a novel model for story ending generation. The model adopts an incremental encoding scheme to represent context clues which are spanning in the story context. In addition, commonsense knowledge is applied through multi-source attention to facilitate story comprehension, and thus to help generate coherent and reasonable endings. Through building context clues and using implicit knowledge, the model is able to produce reasonable story endings. Automatic and manual evaluation shows that our model can generate more reasonable story endings than state-of-the-art baselines1.

Wizard of Wikipedia: Knowledge-Powered Conversational agents

Abstract: In open-domain dialogue intelligent agents should exhibit the use of knowledge, however there are few convincing demonstrations of this to date. The most popular sequence to sequence models typically "generate and hope" generic utterances that can be memorized in the weights of the model when mapping from input utterance(s) to output, rather than employing recalled knowledge as context. Use of knowledge has so far proved difficult, in part because of the lack of a supervised learning benchmark task which exhibits knowledgeable open dialogue with clear grounding. To that end we collect and release a large dataset with conversations directly grounded with knowledge retrieved from Wikipedia. We then design architectures capable of retrieving knowledge, reading and conditioning on it, and finally generating natural responses. Our best performing dialogue models are able to conduct knowledgeable discussions on open-domain topics as evaluated by automatic metrics and human evaluations, while our new benchmark allows for measuring further improvements in this important research direction.

Conversing by Reading: Contentful Neural Conversation with On-demand Machine Reading

Abstract: Although neural conversation models are effective in learning how to produce fluent responses, their primary challenge lies in knowing what to say to make the conversation contentful and non-vacuous. We present a new end-to-end approach to contentful neural conversation that jointly models response generation and on-demand machine reading. The key idea is to provide the conversation model with relevant long-form text on the fly as a source of external knowledge. The model performs QA-style reading comprehension on this text in response to each conversational turn, thereby allowing for more focused integration of external knowledge than has been possible in prior approaches. To support further research on knowledge-grounded conversation, we introduce a new large-scale conversation dataset grounded in external web pages (2.8M turns, 7.4M sentences of grounding). Both human evaluation and automated metrics show that our approach results in more contentful responses compared to a variety of previous methods, improving both the informativeness and diversity of generated output.

We organize papers in this survey according to three dimensions: years, knowledge sources, methods.

Table  {{table:89dae7a1-c28e-4625-b7fe-817072856356}} summarized different papers according to years, knowledge sources, and methods.


On the Robustness of Semantic Segmentation Models to Adversarial Attacks

Abstract: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated exceptional performance on most recognition tasks such as image classification and segmentation. However, they have also been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial examples. This phenomenon has recently attracted a lot of attention but it has not been extensively studied on multiple, large-scale datasets and structured prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation which often require more specialised networks with additional components such as CRFs, dilated convolutions, skip-connections and multiscale processing. In this paper, we present what to our knowledge is the first rigorous evaluation of adversarial attacks on modern semantic segmentation models, using two large-scale datasets. We analyse the effect of different network architectures, model capacity and multiscale processing, and show that many observations made on the task of classification do not always transfer to this more complex task. Furthermore, we show how mean-field inference in deep structured models, multiscale processing (and more generally, input transformations) naturally implement recently proposed adversarial defenses. Our observations will aid future efforts in understanding and defending against adversarial examples. Moreover, in the shorter term, we show how to effectively benchmark robustness and show which segmentation models should currently be preferred in safety-critical applications due to their inherent robustness.

Sequential Attacks on Agents for Long-Term Adversarial Goals

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has advanced greatly in the past few years with the employment of effective deep neural networks (DNNs) on the policy networks. With the great effectiveness came serious vulnerability issues with DNNs that small adversarial perturbations on the input can change the output of the network. Several works have pointed out that learned agents with a DNN policy network can be manipulated against achieving the original task through a sequence of small perturbations on the input states. In this paper, we demonstrate furthermore that it is also possible to impose an arbitrary adversarial reward on the victim policy network through a sequence of attacks. Our method involves the latest adversarial attack technique, Adversarial Transformer Network (ATN), that learns to generate the attack and is easy to integrate into the policy network. As a result of our attack, the victim agent is misguided to optimise for the adversarial reward over time. Our results expose serious security threats for RL applications in safety-critical systems including drones, medical analysis, and self-driving cars.

Adversarial examples for generative models

Abstract: We explore methods of producing adversarial examples on deep generative models such as the variational autoencoder (VAE) and the VAE-GAN. Deep learning architectures are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples, but previous work has focused on the application of adversarial examples to classification tasks. Deep generative models have recently become popular due to their ability to model input data distributions and generate realistic examples from those distributions. We present three classes of attacks on the VAE and VAE-GAN architectures and demonstrate them against networks trained on MNIST, SVHN and CelebA. Our first attack leverages classification-based adversaries by attaching a classifier to the trained encoder of the target generative model, which can then be used to indirectly manipulate the latent representation. Our second attack directly uses the VAE loss function to generate a target reconstruction image from the adversarial example. Our third attack moves beyond relying on classification or the standard loss for the gradient and directly optimizes against differences in source and target latent representations. We also motivate why an attacker might be interested in deploying such techniques against a target generative network.

Interpretable Adversarial Perturbation in Input Embedding Space for Text

Abstract: Following great success in the image processing field, the idea of adversarial training has been applied to tasks in the natural language processing (NLP) field. One promising approach directly applies adversarial training developed in the image processing field to the input word embedding space instead of the discrete input space of texts. However, this approach abandons such interpretability as generating adversarial texts to significantly improve the performance of NLP tasks. This paper restores interpretability to such methods by restricting the directions of perturbations toward the existing words in the input embedding space. As a result, we can straightforwardly reconstruct each input with perturbations to an actual text by considering the perturbations to be the replacement of words in the sentence while maintaining or even improving the task performance.

Crafting adversarial input sequences for recurrent neural networks

Abstract: Machine learning models are frequently used to solve complex security problems, as well as to make decisions in sensitive situations like guiding autonomous vehicles or predicting financial market behaviors. Previous efforts have shown that numerous machine learning models are vulnerable to adversarial manipulations of their inputs taking the form of adversarial samples. Such inputs are crafted by adding carefully selected perturbations to legitimate inputs so as to force the machine learning model to misbehave, for instance by outputting a wrong class if the machine learning task of interest is classification. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, all previous work on adversarial samples crafting for neural networks considered models used to solve classification tasks, most frequently in computer vision applications. In this paper, we investigate adversarial input sequences for recurrent neural networks processing sequential data. We show that the classes of algorithms introduced previously to craft adversarial samples misclassified by feed-forward neural networks can be adapted to recurrent neural networks. In a experiment, we show that adversaries can craft adversarial sequences misleading both categorical and sequential recurrent neural networks.

Adversarial Examples for Evaluating Reading Comprehension Systems

Abstract: Standard accuracy metrics indicate that reading comprehension systems are making rapid progress, but the extent to which these systems truly understand language remains unclear. To reward systems with real language understanding abilities, we propose an adversarial evaluation scheme for the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD). Our method tests whether systems can answer questions about paragraphs that contain adversarially inserted sentences, which are automatically generated to distract computer systems without changing the correct answer or misleading humans. In this adversarial setting, the accuracy of sixteen published models drops from an average of $75\%$ F1 score to $36\%$; when the adversary is allowed to add ungrammatical sequences of words, average accuracy on four models decreases further to $7\%$. We hope our insights will motivate the development of new models that understand language more precisely.

Anomaly Generation Using Generative Adversarial Networks in Host-Based Intrusion Detection

Abstract: Generative adversarial networks have been able to generate striking results in various domains. This generation capability can be general while the networks gain deep understanding regarding the data distribution. In many domains, this data distribution consists of anomalies and normal data, with the anomalies commonly occurring relatively less, creating datasets that are imbalanced. The capabilities that generative adversarial networks offer can be leveraged to examine these anomalies and help alleviate the challenge that imbalanced datasets propose via creating synthetic anomalies. This anomaly generation can be specifically beneficial in domains that have costly data creation processes as well as inherently imbalanced datasets. One of the domains that fits this description is the host-based intrusion detection domain. In this work, ADFA-LD dataset is chosen as the dataset of interest containing system calls of small foot-print next generation attacks. The data is first converted into images, and then a Cycle-GAN is used to create images of anomalous data from images of normal data. The generated data is combined with the original dataset and is used to train a model to detect anomalies. By doing so, it is shown that the classification results are improved, with the AUC rising from 0.55 to 0.71, and the anomaly detection rate rising from 17.07% to 80.49%. The results are also compared to SMOTE, showing the potential presented by generative adversarial networks in anomaly generation.

Adversarial Perturbations Against Deep Neural Networks for Malware Classification

Abstract: Deep neural networks, like many other machine learning models, have recently been shown to lack robustness against adversarially crafted inputs. These inputs are derived from regular inputs by minor yet carefully selected perturbations that deceive machine learning models into desired misclassifications. Existing work in this emerging field was largely specific to the domain of image classification, since the high-entropy of images can be conveniently manipulated without changing the images' overall visual appearance. Yet, it remains unclear how such attacks translate to more security-sensitive applications such as malware detection - which may pose significant challenges in sample generation and arguably grave consequences for failure. In this paper, we show how to construct highly-effective adversarial sample crafting attacks for neural networks used as malware classifiers. The application domain of malware classification introduces additional constraints in the adversarial sample crafting problem when compared to the computer vision domain: (i) continuous, differentiable input domains are replaced by discrete, often binary inputs; and (ii) the loose condition of leaving visual appearance unchanged is replaced by requiring equivalent functional behavior. We demonstrate the feasibility of these attacks on many different instances of malware classifiers that we trained using the DREBIN Android malware data set. We furthermore evaluate to which extent potential defensive mechanisms against adversarial crafting can be leveraged to the setting of malware classification. While feature reduction did not prove to have a positive impact, distillation and re-training on adversarially crafted samples show promising results.

Audio Adversarial Examples: Targeted Attacks on Speech-to-Text

Abstract: We construct targeted audio adversarial examples on automatic speech recognition. Given any audio waveform, we can produce another that is over 99.9% similar, but transcribes as any phrase we choose (recognizing up to 50 characters per second of audio). We apply our white-box iterative optimization-based attack to Mozilla's implementation DeepSpeech end-to-end, and show it has a 100% success rate. The feasibility of this attack introduce a new domain to study adversarial examples.

Domains affected by adversarial machine learning (ML) and their applications

ML and DL act are core ingredients for performing many key tasks in self-driving vehicles. Beyond providing deeply embedded information for the decision making process within the vehicle's components, they also play an important role in V2I and V2V, and V2X communications. As described in earlier sections, ML/DL schemes are very vulnerable to small carefully crafted adversarial perturbations. Self-driving vehicles are also threatened by this security risk along with other traditional security risks. Adversarial ML has affected many application domains including imaging, text, networking, and audio as highlighted in Table {{table:8e6d4179-2beb-4b38-970a-368e9850f40c}} .


Densely Connected Convolutional Networks

Abstract: Recent work has shown that convolutional networks can be substantially deeper, more accurate, and efficient to train if they contain shorter connections between layers close to the input and those close to the output. In this paper, we embrace this observation and introduce the Dense Convolutional Network (DenseNet), which connects each layer to every other layer in a feed-forward fashion. Whereas traditional convolutional networks with L layers have L connections—one between each layer and its subsequent layer—our network has L(L+1)/2 direct connections. For each layer, the feature-maps of all preceding layers are used as inputs, and its own feature-maps are used as inputs into all subsequent layers. DenseNets have several compelling advantages: they alleviate the vanishing-gradient problem, strengthen feature propagation, encourage feature reuse, and substantially reduce the number of parameters. We evaluate our proposed architecture on four highly competitive object recognition benchmark tasks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet). DenseNets obtain significant improvements over the state-of-the-art on most of them, whilst requiring less memory and computation to achieve high performance. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/liuzhuang13/DenseNet.

ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices

Abstract: We introduce an extremely computation-efficient CNN architecture named ShuffleNet, which is designed specially for mobile devices with very limited computing power (e.g., 10-150 MFLOPs). The new architecture utilizes two new operations, pointwise group convolution and channel shuffle, to greatly reduce computation cost while maintaining accuracy. Experiments on ImageNet classification and MS COCO object detection demonstrate the superior performance of ShuffleNet over other structures, e.g. lower top-1 error (absolute 7.8%) than recent MobileNet [12] on ImageNet classification task, under the computation budget of 40 MFLOPs. On an ARM-based mobile device, ShuffleNet achieves ~13Ã— actual speedup over AlexNet while maintaining comparable accuracy.

Validation accuracy results on learned vs. fixed classifier

Table {{table:56354779-a406-4825-aecf-05dfe0058911}}  summarizes our fixed-classifier results on convolutional networks, comparing to originally reported results. We offer our drop-in replacement for learned classifier that can be used to train models with fixed classifiers and replicate our resultsCode is available at https://github.com/paper-submissions/NoLinear.


International Journal of Molecular Sciences

Assessment of RNA SS and orangeCLIP in detail

Comprehensive assessment on blueRNA-binding sites prediction from multiple web servers, bluedatasets, and protein-nucleic acid complexes

Computational approaches for RBPs and blueRNA-binding sites prediction

Computational methods for macromolecular docking and for scoring magenta3D structural models of RNP complexes

Deep learning architectures for predicting oliveDNA- and RNA-binding specificity

Beyond CLIP: advances and opportunities to measure RBP–RNA and RNA–RNA interactions

Abstract: Abstract RNA is an essential player in almost all biological processes, and has an ever-growing number of roles in regulating cellular growth and organization. RNA functions extend far beyond just coding for proteins and RNA has been shown to function in signaling events, chromatin organization and transcriptional regulation. Dissecting how the complex network of RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) and regulatory RNAs interact with their substrates within the cell is a real, but exciting, challenge for the RNA community. Investigating these biological questions has fueled the development of new quantitative technologies to measure how RNA and RBPs interact both locally and on a global scale. In this review, we provide an assessment of available approaches to enable researchers to select the protocol most applicable for their experimental question.

A Large-Scale Assessment of Nucleic Acids Binding Site Prediction Programs

Abstract: Computational prediction of nucleic acid binding sites in proteins are necessary to disentangle functional mechanisms in most biological processes and to explore the binding mechanisms. Several strategies have been proposed, but the state-of-the-art approaches display a great diversity in i) the definition of nucleic acid binding sites; ii) the training and test datasets; iii) the algorithmic methods for the prediction strategies; iv) the performance measures and v) the distribution and availability of the prediction programs. Here we report a large-scale assessment of 19 web servers and 3 stand-alone programs on 41 datasets including more than 5000 proteins derived from 3D structures of protein-nucleic acid complexes. Well-defined binary assessment criteria (specificity, sensitivity, precision, accuracy…) are applied. We found that i) the tools have been greatly improved over the years; ii) some of the approaches suffer from theoretical defects and there is still room for sorting out the essential mechanisms of binding; iii) RNA binding and DNA binding appear to follow similar driving forces and iv) dataset bias may exist in some methods.

Computational Prediction of RNA-Binding Proteins and Binding Sites

Abstract: Proteins and RNA interaction have vital roles in many cellular processes such as protein synthesis, sequence encoding, RNA transfer, and gene regulation at the transcriptional and post-transcriptional levels. Approximately 6%–8% of all proteins are RNA-binding proteins (RBPs). Distinguishing these RBPs or their binding residues is a major aim of structural biology. Previously, a number of experimental methods were developed for the determination of protein–RNA interactions. However, these experimental methods are expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. Alternatively, researchers have developed many computational approaches to predict RBPs and protein–RNA binding sites, by combining various machine learning methods and abundant sequence and/or structural features. There are three kinds of computational approaches, which are prediction from protein sequence, prediction from protein structure, and protein-RNA docking. In this paper, we review all existing studies of predictions of RNA-binding sites and RBPs and complexes, including data sets used in different approaches, sequence and structural features used in several predictors, prediction method classifications, performance comparisons, evaluation methods, and future directions.

Bioinformatics Tools and Benchmarks for Computational Docking and 3D Structure Prediction of RNA-Protein Complexes

Abstract: RNA-protein (RNP) interactions play essential roles in many biological processes, such as regulation of co-transcriptional and post-transcriptional gene expression, RNA splicing, transport, storage and stabilization, as well as protein synthesis. An increasing number of RNP structures would aid in a better understanding of these processes. However, due to the technical difficulties associated with experimental determination of macromolecular structures by high-resolution methods, studies on RNP recognition and complex formation present significant challenges. As an alternative, computational prediction of RNP interactions can be carried out. Structural models obtained by theoretical predictive methods are, in general, less reliable compared to models based on experimental measurements but they can be sufficiently accurate to be used as a basis for to formulating functional hypotheses. In this article, we present an overview of computational methods for 3D structure prediction of RNP complexes. We discuss currently available methods for macromolecular docking and for scoring 3D structural models of RNP complexes in particular. Additionally, we also review benchmarks that have been developed to assess the accuracy of these methods.

Comprehensive evaluation of deep learning architectures for prediction of DNA/RNA sequence binding specificities

Abstract: Abstract Motivation Deep learning architectures have recently demonstrated their power in predicting DNA- and RNA-binding specificity. Existing methods fall into three classes: Some are based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), others use recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and others rely on hybrid architectures combining CNNs and RNNs. However, based on existing studies the relative merit of the various architectures remains unclear. Results In this study we present a systematic exploration of deep learning architectures for predicting DNA- and RNA-binding specificity. For this purpose, we present deepRAM, an end-to-end deep learning tool that provides an implementation of a wide selection of architectures; its fully automatic model selection procedure allows us to perform a fair and unbiased comparison of deep learning architectures. We find that deeper more complex architectures provide a clear advantage with sufficient training data, and that hybrid CNN/RNN architectures outperform other methods in terms of accuracy. Our work provides guidelines that can assist the practitioner in choosing an appropriate network architecture, and provides insight on the difference between the models learned by convolutional and recurrent networks. In particular, we find that although recurrent networks improve model accuracy, this comes at the expense of a loss in the interpretability of the features learned by the model. Availability and implementation The source code for deepRAM is available at https://github.com/MedChaabane/deepRAM. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Summary and comparison of the existing reviews on the studies of protein-RNA interaction. blackSorted by the published year, the reviews are divided into different categories based on their main focuses: CLIP, RNA-binding sites, 3D structural information, DNA-binding specificity, RNA-protein interaction data, and RNA-binding preferences.

In recent years, we have witnessed the significant improvement of both the structure determination methods {{cite:dfeb155}} and prediction methods {{cite:0c2a5ea}}, {{cite:3a3d152}}, {{cite:6979717}}, {{cite:f1aee75}}, {{cite:46bf2da}}, {{cite:e0c854d}}, {{cite:66abca6}}. Considering the success of the previous computational methods targeting protein-RNA interaction prediction based on structural information, it is foreseeable that researchers will make significant progress in this field (Figure {{figure:b19eef62-2ddf-4c23-800b-26ca78d9e2b3}} ). Given that, we review this field thoroughly in this paper, emphasizing the structural information. In this work, we also consider the protein-RNA interaction binding site and binding preference prediction simultaneously for the first time, considering their intrinsic relationship.
We notice that there are some existing related reviews focusing on different aspects of this problem. More specifically, Pan et al. {{cite:cfa2103}}; Yan and Zhu et al. {{cite:1450ee2}}; Sagar and Xue et al. {{cite:4c46bb5}} list the recently developed deep learning tools for predicting binding preference. Trabelsi et al. {{cite:72f8e81}} evaluates the performance of different deep learning models on predicting the binding preference. Yan et al. {{cite:d1807c7}}; Si et al. {{cite:65fe9cd}}; Miao and Westhof {{cite:814caf0}} list and evaluate the tools for predicting binding sites on protein, while all the involved methods were developed before 2014, which means that the deep learning methods are not included. Hafner et al. {{cite:ac58caa}}; Ramanathan et al. {{cite:91a598d}}, Licatalosi et al. {{cite:d6a12b2}}; Corley et al. {{cite:bb64942}} summarize the related biological experimental techniques to study the interactions as well as the biological insights and mechanism behind the interactions. blackMore recently, Jamasb et al. {{cite:7a2a05f}} concluded the computational methods for protein-protein interaction site prediction with deep learning approaches. Also, the work of Day et al. {{cite:bc69521}}, namely Message Passing Neural Processes (MPNPs), successfully improved the performance of the node classification task in the protein-protein interaction site prediction problem. It uses the protein structural data as the interacting residue graph, which thrives at lower sampling rates. Our work, which unifies two intrinsically related computational problems and highlights the importance of structural information, can provide new insights into the topic.
Table {{table:40f0feef-5ff2-4a12-82ab-22de3a7920c8}}  summarizes the main focuses of different review papers.


3D Bounding Box Estimation Using Deep Learning and Geometry

Abstract: We present a method for 3D object detection and pose estimation from a single image. In contrast to current techniques that only regress the 3D orientation of an object, our method first regresses relatively stable 3D object properties using a deep convolutional neural network and then combines these estimates with geometric constraints provided by a 2D object bounding box to produce a complete 3D bounding box. The first network output estimates the 3D object orientation using a novel hybrid discrete-continuous loss, which significantly outperforms the L2 loss. The second output regresses the 3D object dimensions, which have relatively little variance compared to alternatives and can often be predicted for many object types. These estimates, combined with the geometric constraints on translation imposed by the 2D bounding box, enable us to recover a stable and accurate 3D object pose. We evaluate our method on the challenging KITTI object detection benchmark [2] both on the official metric of 3D orientation estimation and also on the accuracy of the obtained 3D bounding boxes. Although conceptually simple, our method outperforms more complex and computationally expensive approaches that leverage semantic segmentation, instance level segmentation and flat ground priors [4] and sub-category detection [23][24]. Our discrete-continuous loss also produces state of the art results for 3D viewpoint estimation on the Pascal 3D+ dataset[26].

Deep Fitting Degree Scoring Network for Monocular 3D Object Detection

Abstract: In this paper, we propose to learn a deep fitting degree scoring network for monocular 3D object detection, which aims to score fitting degree between proposals and object conclusively. Different from most existing monocular frameworks which use tight constraint to get 3D location, our approach achieves high-precision localization through measuring the visual fitting degree between the projected 3D proposals and the object. We first regress the dimension and orientation of the object using an anchor-based method so that a suitable 3D proposal can be constructed. We propose FQNet, which can infer the 3D IoU between the 3D proposals and the object solely based on 2D cues. Therefore, during the detection process, we sample a large number of candidates in the 3D space and project these 3D bounding boxes on 2D image individually. The best candidate can be picked out by simply exploring the spatial overlap between proposals and the object, in the form of the output 3D IoU score of FQNet. Experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

GS3D: An Efficient 3D Object Detection Framework for Autonomous Driving

Abstract: We present an efficient 3D object detection framework based on a single RGB image in the scenario of autonomous driving. Our efforts are put on extracting the underlying 3D information in a 2D image and determining the accurate 3D bounding box of object without point cloud or stereo data. Leveraging the off-the-shelf 2D object detector, we propose an artful approach to efficiently obtain a coarse cuboid for each predicted 2D box. The coarse cuboid has enough accuracy to guide us to determine the 3D box of the object by refinement. In contrast to previous state-of-the-art methods that only use the features extracted from the 2D bounding box for box refinement, we explore the 3D structure information of the object by employing the visual features of visible surfaces. The new features from surfaces are utilized to eliminate the problem of representation ambiguity brought by only using 2D bounding box. Moreover, we investigate different methods of 3D box refinement and discover that a classification formulation with quality aware loss have much better performance than regression. Evaluated on KITTI benchmark, our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods for single RGB image based 3D object detection.

Monocular 3D Object Detection Leveraging Accurate Proposals and Shape Reconstruction

Abstract: We present MonoPSR, a monocular 3D object detection method that leverages proposals and shape reconstruction. First, using the fundamental relations of a pinhole camera model, detections from a mature 2D object detector are used to generate a 3D proposal per object in a scene. The 3D location of these proposals prove to be quite accurate, which greatly reduces the difficulty of regressing the final 3D bounding box detection. Simultaneously, a point cloud is predicted in an object centered coordinate system to learn local scale and shape information. However, the key challenge is how to exploit shape information to guide 3D localization. As such, we devise aggregate losses, including a novel projection alignment loss, to jointly optimize these tasks in the neural network to improve 3D localization accuracy. We validate our method on the KITTI benchmark where we set new state-of-the-art results among published monocular methods, including the harder pedestrian and cyclist classes, while maintaining efficient run-time.

M3D-RPN: Monocular 3D Region Proposal Network for Object Detection

Abstract: Understanding the world in 3D is a critical component of urban autonomous driving. Generally, the combination of expensive LiDAR sensors and stereo RGB imaging has been paramount for successful 3D object detection algorithms, whereas monocular image-only methods experience drastically reduced performance. We propose to reduce the gap by reformulating the monocular 3D detection problem as a standalone 3D region proposal network. We leverage the geometric relationship of 2D and 3D perspectives, allowing 3D boxes to utilize well-known and powerful convolutional features generated in the image-space. To help address the strenuous 3D parameter estimations, we further design depth-aware convolutional layers which enable location specific feature development and in consequence improved 3D scene understanding. Compared to prior work in monocular 3D detection, our method consists of only the proposed 3D region proposal network rather than relying on external networks, data, or multiple stages. M3D-RPN is able to significantly improve the performance of both monocular 3D Object Detection and Bird's Eye View tasks within the KITTI urban autonomous driving dataset, while efficiently using a shared multi-class model.

MonoPair: Monocular 3D Object Detection Using Pairwise Spatial Relationships

Abstract: Monocular 3D object detection is an essential component in autonomous driving while challenging to solve, especially for those occluded samples which are only partially visible. Most detectors consider each 3D object as an independent training target, inevitably resulting in a lack of useful information for occluded samples. To this end, we propose a novel method to improve the monocular 3D object detection by considering the relationship of paired samples. This allows us to encode spatial constraints for partially-occluded objects from their adjacent neighbors. Specifically, the proposed detector computes uncertainty-aware predictions for object locations and 3D distances for the adjacent object pairs, which are subsequently jointly optimized by nonlinear least squares. Finally, the one-stage uncertainty-aware prediction structure and the post-optimization module are dedicatedly integrated for ensuring the run-time efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that our method yields the best performance on KITTI 3D detection benchmark, by outperforming state-of-the-art competitors by wide margins, especially for the hard samples.

Disp R-CNN: Stereo 3D Object Detection via Shape Prior Guided Instance Disparity Estimation

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel system named Disp R-CNN for 3D object detection from stereo images. Many recent works solve this problem by first recovering a point cloud with disparity estimation and then apply a 3D detector. The disparity map is computed for the entire image, which is costly and fails to leverage category-specific prior. In contrast, we design an instance disparity estimation network (iDispNet) that predicts disparity only for pixels on objects of interest and learns a category-specific shape prior for more accurate disparity estimation. To address the challenge from scarcity of disparity annotation in training, we propose to use a statistical shape model to generate dense disparity pseudo-ground-truth without the need of LiDAR point clouds, which makes our system more widely applicable. Experiments on the KITTI dataset show that, even when LiDAR ground-truth is not available at training time, Disp R-CNN achieves competitive performance and outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by 20% in terms of average precision. The code will be available at https://github.com/zju3dv/disprcnn.

Learning Depth-Guided Convolutions for Monocular 3D Object Detection

Abstract: 3D object detection from a single image without LiDAR is a challenging task due to the lack of accurate depth information. Conventional 2D convolutions are unsuitable for this task because they fail to capture local object and its scale information, which are vital for 3D object detection. To better represent 3D structure, prior arts typically transform depth maps estimated from 2D images into a pseudo-LiDAR representation, and then apply existing 3D point-cloud based object detectors. However, their results depend heavily on the accuracy of the estimated depth maps, resulting in suboptimal performance. In this work, instead of using pseudo-LiDAR representation, we improve the fundamental 2D fully convolutions by proposing a new local convolutional network (LCN), termed Depth-guided Dynamic-Depthwise-Dilated LCN (D4LCN), where the filters and their receptive fields can be automatically learned from image-based depth maps, making different pixels of different images have different filters. D4LCN overcomes the limitation of conventional 2D convolutions and narrows the gap between image representation and 3D point cloud representation. Extensive experiments show that D4LCN outperforms existing works by large margins. For example, the relative improvement of D4LCN against the state-of-the-art on KITTI is 9.1% in the moderate setting. D4LCN ranks 1st on KITTI monocular 3D object detection benchmark at the time of submission (car, December 2019). The code is available at https://github.com/dingmyu/D4LCN.

Exploring Intermediate Representation for Monocular Vehicle Pose Estimation

Abstract: We present a new learning-based framework to recover vehicle pose in SO(3) from a single RGB image. In contrast to previous works that map local appearance to observation angles, we explore a progressive approach by extracting meaningful Intermediate Geometrical Representations (IGRs) to estimate egocentric vehicle orientation. This approach features a deep model that transforms perceived intensities to IGRs, which are mapped to a 3D representation encoding object orientation in the camera coordinate system. Core problems are what IGRs to use and how to learn them more effectively. We answer the former question by designing IGRs based on an interpolated cuboid that derives from primitive 3D annotation readily. The latter question motivates us to incorporate geometry knowledge with a new loss function based on a projective invariant. This loss function allows unlabeled data to be used in the training stage to improve representation learning. Without additional labels, our system outperforms previous monocular RGB-based methods for joint vehicle detection and pose estimation on the KITTI benchmark, achieving performance even comparable to stereo methods. Code and pre-trained models are available at this HTTPS URL1.

System-level evaluation by comparing Average Orientation Similarity ({{formula:8de3ee1b-8568-4c75-8cf2-a0c4212d965e}} ) with previous learning-based methods on the KITTI test set for the car category. Without using LiDAR data {{cite:ba5a7b3}} during training (indicated by +LiDAR) or temporal information {{cite:94784cc}}, a monocular system using Ego-Net out-performs previous image-based methods.

Joint object detection and orientation estimation performance

Ego-Net can be used with a 2D proposal model to form a joint object detection and orientation estimation system, whose performance is measured by {{formula:b248edca-01e9-4abe-bfcd-9ad72a7494bf}} . Per the proposals used in {{cite:1f1e45a}}, Tab. {{table:2e239465-b8f4-4cf1-a2a9-61480e331b36}}  compares the {{formula:34807c89-00c6-4fa3-90a0-609687192e33}}  of our system using Ego-Net with other approaches on the KITTI test set for the car category. Among the single-view image-based approaches, our system outperforms others by a clear margin. Our approach using a single image outperforms Kinematic3D {{cite:94784cc}} which exploits temporal information using RGB video. This result indicates that vehicle pose can be reliably estimated with a single frame. In fact, our approach can also serve for per-frame initialization of temporal models.