Shrinking POMCP: A Framework for Real-Time UAV Search and Rescue

Efficient path optimization for drones in search and rescue operations faces challenges, including limited visibility, time constraints, and complex information gathering in urban environments. We present a comprehensive approach to optimize UAV-based search and rescue operations in neighborhood areas, utilizing both a 3D AirSim-ROS2 simulator and a 2D simulator. The path planning problem is formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), and we propose a novel ``Shrinking POMCP'' approach to address time constraints. In the AirSim environment, we integrate our approach with a probabilistic world model for belief maintenance and a neurosymbolic navigator for obstacle avoidance. The 2D simulator employs surrogate ROS2 nodes with equivalent functionality. We compare trajectories generated by different approaches in the 2D simulator and evaluate performance across various belief types in the 3D AirSim-ROS simulator. Experimental results from both simulators demonstrate that our proposed shrinking POMCP solution achieves significant improvements in search times compared to alternative methods, showcasing its potential for enhancing the efficiency of UAV-assisted search and rescue operations.

Addressing Uncertainty in LLMs to Enhance Reliability in Generative AI

In this paper, we present a dynamic semantic clustering approach inspired by the Chinese Restaurant Process, aimed at addressing uncertainty in the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs). We quantify uncertainty of an LLM on a given query by calculating entropy of the generated semantic clusters. Further, we propose leveraging the (negative) likelihood of these clusters as the (non)conformity score within Conformal Prediction framework, allowing the model to predict a set of responses instead of a single output, thereby accounting for uncertainty in its predictions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our uncertainty quantification (UQ) technique on two well known question answering benchmarks, COQA and TriviaQA, utilizing two LLMs, Llama2 and Mistral. Our approach achieves SOTA performance in UQ, as assessed by metrics such as AUROC, AUARC, and AURAC. The proposed conformal predictor is also shown to produce smaller prediction sets while maintaining the same probabilistic guarantee of including the correct response, in comparison to existing SOTA conformal prediction baseline.

Concept-based Analysis of Neural Networks via Vision-Language Models

The analysis of vision-based deep neural networks (DNNs) is highly desirable but it is very challenging due to the difficulty of expressing formal specifications for vision tasks and the lack of efficient verification procedures. In this paper, we propose to leverage emerging multimodal, vision-language, foundation models (VLMs) as a lens through which we can reason about vision models. VLMs have been trained on a large body of images accompanied by their textual description, and are thus implicitly aware of high-level, human-understandable concepts describing the images. We describe a logical specification language $\texttt{Con}_{\texttt{spec}}$ designed to facilitate writing specifications in terms of these concepts. To define and formally check $\texttt{Con}_{\texttt{spec}}$ specifications, we build a map between the internal representations of a given vision model and a VLM, leading to an efficient verification procedure of natural-language properties for vision models. We demonstrate our techniques on a ResNet-based classifier trained on the RIVAL-10 dataset using CLIP as the multimodal model.

BRI3L: A Brightness Illusion Image Dataset for Identification and Localization of Regions of Illusory Perception

Visual illusions play a significant role in understanding visual perception. Current methods in understanding and evaluating visual illusions are mostly deterministic filtering based approach and they evaluate on a handful of visual illusions, and the conclusions therefore, are not generic. To this end, we generate a large-scale dataset of 22,366 images (BRI3L: BRightness Illusion Image dataset for Identification and Localization of illusory perception) of the five types of brightness illusions and benchmark the dataset using data-driven neural network based approaches. The dataset contains label information - (1) whether a particular image is illusory/nonillusory, (2) the segmentation mask of the illusory region of the image. Hence, both the classification and segmentation task can be evaluated using this dataset. We follow the standard psychophysical experiments involving human subjects to validate the dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to develop a dataset of visual illusions and benchmark using data-driven approach for illusion classification and localization. We consider five well-studied types of brightness illusions: 1) Hermann grid, 2) Simultaneous Brightness Contrast, 3) White illusion, 4) Grid illusion, and 5) Induced Grating illusion. Benchmarking on the dataset achieves 99.56% accuracy in illusion identification and 84.37% pixel accuracy in illusion localization. The application of deep learning model, it is shown, also generalizes over unseen brightness illusions like brightness assimilation to contrast transitions. We also test the ability of state-of-theart diffusion models to generate brightness illusions. We have provided all the code, dataset, instructions etc in the github repo: https://github.com/aniket004/BRI3L

Direct Amortized Likelihood Ratio Estimation

We introduce a new amortized likelihood ratio estimator for likelihood-free simulation-based inference (SBI). Our estimator is simple to train and estimates the likelihood ratio using a single forward pass of the neural estimator. Our approach directly computes the likelihood ratio between two competing parameter sets which is different from the previous approach of comparing two neural network output values. We refer to our model as the direct neural ratio estimator (DNRE). As part of introducing the DNRE, we derive a corresponding Monte Carlo estimate of the posterior. We benchmark our new ratio estimator and compare to previous ratio estimators in the literature. We show that our new ratio estimator often outperforms these previous approaches. As a further contribution, we introduce a new derivative estimator for likelihood ratio estimators that enables us to compare likelihood-free Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) with random-walk Metropolis-Hastings (MH). We show that HMC is equally competitive, which has not been previously shown. Finally, we include a novel real-world application of SBI by using our neural ratio estimator to design a quadcopter. Code is available at https://github.com/SRI-CSL/dnre.

TIJO: Trigger Inversion with Joint Optimization for Defending Multimodal Backdoored Models

We present a Multimodal Backdoor Defense technique TIJO (Trigger Inversion using Joint Optimization). Recent work arXiv:2112.07668 has demonstrated successful backdoor attacks on multimodal models for the Visual Question Answering task. Their dual-key backdoor trigger is split across two modalities (image and text), such that the backdoor is activated if and only if the trigger is present in both modalities. We propose TIJO that defends against dual-key attacks through a joint optimization that reverse-engineers the trigger in both the image and text modalities. This joint optimization is challenging in multimodal models due to the disconnected nature of the visual pipeline which consists of an offline feature extractor, whose output is then fused with the text using a fusion module. The key insight enabling the joint optimization in TIJO is that the trigger inversion needs to be carried out in the object detection box feature space as opposed to the pixel space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the TrojVQA benchmark, where TIJO improves upon the state-of-the-art unimodal methods from an AUC of 0.6 to 0.92 on multimodal dual-key backdoors. Furthermore, our method also improves upon the unimodal baselines on unimodal backdoors. We present ablation studies and qualitative results to provide insights into our algorithm such as the critical importance of overlaying the inverted feature triggers on all visual features during trigger inversion. The prototype implementation of TIJO is available at https://github.com/SRI-CSL/TIJO.

AircraftVerse: A Large-Scale Multimodal Dataset of Aerial Vehicle Designs

We present AircraftVerse, a publicly available aerial vehicle design dataset. Aircraft design encompasses different physics domains and, hence, multiple modalities of representation. The evaluation of these cyber-physical system (CPS) designs requires the use of scientific analytical and simulation models ranging from computer-aided design tools for structural and manufacturing analysis, computational fluid dynamics tools for drag and lift computation, battery models for energy estimation, and simulation models for flight control and dynamics. AircraftVerse contains 27,714 diverse air vehicle designs - the largest corpus of engineering designs with this level of complexity. Each design comprises the following artifacts: a symbolic design tree describing topology, propulsion subsystem, battery subsystem, and other design details; a STandard for the Exchange of Product (STEP) model data; a 3D CAD design using a stereolithography (STL) file format; a 3D point cloud for the shape of the design; and evaluation results from high fidelity state-of-the-art physics models that characterize performance metrics such as maximum flight distance and hover-time. We also present baseline surrogate models that use different modalities of design representation to predict design performance metrics, which we provide as part of our dataset release. Finally, we discuss the potential impact of this dataset on the use of learning in aircraft design and, more generally, in CPS. AircraftVerse is accompanied by a data card, and it is released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. The dataset is hosted at https://zenodo.org/record/6525446, baseline models and code at https://github.com/SRI-CSL/AircraftVerse, and the dataset description at https://aircraftverse.onrender.com/.

Automatic Measures for Evaluating Generative Design Methods for Architects

The recent explosion of high-quality image-to-image methods has prompted interest in applying image-to-image methods towards artistic and design tasks. Of interest for architects is to use these methods to generate design proposals from conceptual sketches, usually hand-drawn sketches that are quickly developed and can embody a design intent. More specifically, instantiating a sketch into a visual that can be used to elicit client feedback is typically a time consuming task, and being able to speed up this iteration time is important. While the body of work in generative methods has been impressive, there has been a mismatch between the quality measures used to evaluate the outputs of these systems and the actual expectations of architects. In particular, most recent image-based works place an emphasis on realism of generated images. While important, this is one of several criteria architects look for. In this work, we describe the expectations architects have for design proposals from conceptual sketches, and identify corresponding automated metrics from the literature. We then evaluate several image-to-image generative methods that may address these criteria and examine their performance across these metrics. From these results, we identify certain challenges with hand-drawn conceptual sketches and describe possible future avenues of investigation to address them.

DiffAlign : Few-shot learning using diffusion based synthesis and alignment

We address the problem of few-shot classification where the goal is to learn a classifier from a limited set of samples. While data-driven learning is shown to be effective in various applications, learning from less data still remains challenging. To address this challenge, existing approaches consider various data augmentation techniques for increasing the number of training samples. Pseudo-labeling is commonly used in a few-shot setup, where approximate labels are estimated for a large set of unlabeled images. We propose DiffAlign which focuses on generating images from class labels. Specifically, we leverage the recent success of the generative models (e.g., DALL-E and diffusion models) that can generate realistic images from texts. However, naive learning on synthetic images is not adequate due to the domain gap between real and synthetic images. Thus, we employ a maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) loss to align the synthetic images to the real images minimizing the domain gap. We evaluate our method on the standard few-shot classification benchmarks: CIFAR-FS, FC100, miniImageNet, tieredImageNet and a cross-domain few-shot classification benchmark: miniImageNet to CUB. The proposed approach significantly outperforms the stateof-the-art in both 5-shot and 1-shot setups on these benchmarks. Our approach is also shown to be effective in the zero-shot classification setup

Design of Unmanned Air Vehicles Using Transformer Surrogate Models

Computer-aided design (CAD) is a promising new area for the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The current practice of design of cyber-physical systems uses the digital twin methodology, wherein the actual physical design is preceded by building detailed models that can be evaluated by physics simulation models. These physics models are often slow and the manual design process often relies on exploring near-by variations of existing designs. AI holds the promise of breaking these design silos and increasing the diversity and performance of designs by accelerating the exploration of the design space. In this paper, we focus on the design of electrical unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The high-density batteries and purely electrical propulsion systems have disrupted the space of UAV design, making this domain an ideal target for AI-based design. In this paper, we develop an AI Designer that synthesizes novel UAV designs. Our approach uses a deep transformer model with a novel domain-specific encoding such that we can evaluate the performance of new proposed designs without running expensive flight dynamics models and CAD tools. We demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces the overall compute requirements for the design process and accelerates the design space exploration. Finally, we identify future research directions to achieve full-scale deployment of AI-assisted CAD for UAVs.