Defense against adversarial attacks on deep convolutional neural networks through nonlocal denoising

Despite substantial advances in network architecture performance, the susceptibility of adversarial attacks makes deep learning challenging to implement in safety-critical applications. This paper proposes a data-centric approach to addressing this problem. A nonlocal denoising method with different luminance values has been used to generate adversarial examples from the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology database (MNIST) and Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR-10) data sets. Under perturbation, the method provided absolute accuracy improvements of up to 9.3% in the MNIST data set and 13% in the CIFAR-10 data set. Training using transformed images with higher luminance values increases the robustness of the classifier. We have shown that transfer learning is disadvantageous for adversarial machine learning. The results indicate that simple adversarial examples can improve resilience and make deep learning easier to apply in various applications.

Transfer learning for cancer diagnosis in histopathological images

Transfer learning allows us to exploit knowledge gained from one task to assist in solving another but relevant task. In modern computer vision research, the question is which architecture performs better for a given dataset. In this paper, we compare the performance of 14 pre-trained ImageNet models on the histopathologic cancer detection dataset, where each model has been configured as a naive model, feature extractor model, or fine-tuned model. Densenet161 has been shown to have high precision whilst Resnet101 has a high recall. A high precision model is suitable to be used when follow-up examination cost is high, whilst low precision but a high recall/sensitivity model can be used when the cost of follow-up examination is low. Results also show that transfer learning helps to converge a model faster.