TrojText: Test-time Invisible Textual Trojan Insertion

In Natural Language Processing (NLP), intelligent neuron models can be susceptible to textual Trojan attacks. Such attacks occur when Trojan models behave normally for standard inputs but generate malicious output for inputs that contain a specific trigger. Syntactic-structure triggers, which are invisible, are becoming more popular for Trojan attacks because they are difficult to detect and defend against. However, these types of attacks require a large corpus of training data to generate poisoned samples with the necessary syntactic structures for Trojan insertion. Obtaining such data can be difficult for attackers, and the process of generating syntactic poisoned triggers and inserting Trojans can be time-consuming. This paper proposes a solution called TrojText, which aims to determine whether invisible textual Trojan attacks can be performed more efficiently and cost-effectively without training data. The proposed approach, called the Representation-Logit Trojan Insertion (RLI) algorithm, uses smaller sampled test data instead of large training data to achieve the desired attack. The paper also introduces two additional techniques, namely the accumulated gradient ranking (AGR) and Trojan Weights Pruning (TWP), to reduce the number of tuned parameters and the attack overhead. The TrojText approach was evaluated on three datasets (AG's News, SST-2, and OLID) using three NLP models (BERT, XLNet, and DeBERTa). The experiments demonstrated that the TrojText approach achieved a 98.35\% classification accuracy for test sentences in the target class on the BERT model for the AG's News dataset. The source code for TrojText is available at https://github.com/UCF-ML-Research/TrojText.

GTrans: Spatiotemporal Autoregressive Transformer with Graph Embeddings for Nowcasting Extreme Events

Spatiotemporal time series nowcasting should preserve temporal and spatial dynamics in the sense that generated new sequences from models respect the covariance relationship from history. Conventional feature extractors are built with deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). However, CNN models have limits to image-like applications where data can be formed with high-dimensional arrays. In contrast, applications in social networks, road traffic, physics, and chemical property prediction where data features can be organized with nodes and edges of graphs. Transformer architecture is an emerging method for predictive models, bringing high accuracy and efficiency due to attention mechanism design. This paper proposes a spatiotemporal model, namely GTrans, that transforms data features into graph embeddings and predicts temporal dynamics with a transformer model. According to our experiments, we demonstrate that GTrans can model spatial and temporal dynamics and nowcasts extreme events for datasets. Furthermore, in all the experiments, GTrans can achieve the highest F1 and F2 scores in binary-class prediction tests than the baseline models.

Earthquake Nowcasting with Deep Learning

We review previous approaches to nowcasting earthquakes and introduce new approaches based on deep learning using three distinct models based on recurrent neural networks and transformers. We discuss different choices for observables and measures presenting promising initial results for a region of Southern California from 1950-2020. Earthquake activity is predicted as a function of 0.1-degree spatial bins for time periods varying from two weeks to four years. The overall quality is measured by the Nash Sutcliffe Efficiency comparing the deviation of nowcast and observation with the variance over time in each spatial region. The software is available as open-source together with the preprocessed data from the USGS.

Top 3 in FG 2021 Families In the Wild Kinship Verification Challenge

Kinship verification is the task of determining whether a parent-child, sibling, or grandparent-grandchild relationship exists between two people and is important in social media applications, forensic investigations, finding missing children, and reuniting families. We demonstrate high quality kinship verification by participating in the 2021 Recognizing Families in the Wild challenge which provides the largest publicly available dataset in the field. Our approach is among the top 3 winning entries in the competition. We ensemble models written by both human experts and OpenAI Codex. We make our models and code publicly available.

Inverse Kinematics and Dexterous Workspace Formulation for 2-Segment Continuum Robots with Inextensible Segments

The inverse kinematics (IK) problem of continuum robots has been investigated in depth in the past decades. Under the constant-curvature bending assumption, closed-form IK solution has been obtained for continuum robots with variable segment lengths. Attempting to close the gap towards a complete solution, this paper presents an efficient solution for the IK problem of 2-segment continuum robots with one or two inextensible segments (a.k.a, constant segment lengths). Via representing the robot's shape as piecewise line segments, the configuration variables are separated from the IK formulation such that solving a one-variable nonlinear equation leads to the solution of the entire IK problem. Furthermore, an in-depth investigation of the boundaries of the dexterous workspace of the end effector caused by the configuration variables limits as well as the angular velocity singularities of the continuum robots was established. This dexterous workspace formulation, which is derived for the first time to the best of the authors' knowledge, is particularly useful to find the closest orientation to a target pose when the target orientation is out of the dexterous workspace. In the comparative simulation studies between the proposed method and the Jacobian-based IK method involving 500,000 cases, the proposed variable separation method solved 100% of the IK problems with much higher computational efficiency.

Spatial Attention-based Non-reference Perceptual Quality Prediction Network for Omnidirectional Images

Due to the strong correlation between visual attention and perceptual quality, many methods attempt to use human saliency information for image quality assessment. Although this mechanism can get good performance, the networks require human saliency labels, which is not easily accessible for omnidirectional images (ODI). To alleviate this issue, we propose a spatial attention-based perceptual quality prediction network for non-reference quality assessment on ODIs (SAP-net). To drive our SAP-net, we establish a large-scale IQA dataset of ODIs (IQA-ODI), which is composed of subjective scores of 200 subjects on 1,080 ODIs. In IQA-ODI, there are 120 high quality ODIs as reference, and 960 ODIs with impairments in both JPEG compression and map projection. Without any human saliency labels, our network can adaptively estimate human perceptual quality on impaired ODIs through a self-attention manner, which significantly promotes the prediction performance of quality scores. Moreover, our method greatly reduces the computational complexity in quality assessment task on ODIs. Extensive experiments validate that our network outperforms 9 state-of-the-art methods for quality assessment on ODIs. The dataset and code have been available on \url{ https://github.com/yanglixiaoshen/SAP-Net}.

TSEQPREDICTOR: Spatiotemporal Extreme Earthquakes Forecasting for Southern California

Seismology from the past few decades has utilized the most advanced technologies and equipment to monitor seismic events globally. However, forecasting disasters like earthquakes is still an underdeveloped topic from the history. Recent researches in spatiotemporal forecasting have revealed some possibilities of successful predictions, which becomes an important topic in many scientific research fields. Most studies of them have many successful applications of using deep neural networks. In the geoscience study, earthquake prediction is one of the world's most challenging problems, about which cutting edge deep learning technologies may help to discover some useful patterns. In this project, we propose a joint deep learning modeling method for earthquake forecasting, namely TSEQPREDICTOR. In TSEQPREDICTOR, we use comprehensive deep learning technologies with domain knowledge in seismology and exploit the prediction problem using encoder-decoder and temporal convolutional neural networks. Comparing to some state-of-art recurrent neural networks, our experiments show our method is promising in terms of predicting major shocks for earthquakes in Southern California.

CryptoGRU: Low Latency Privacy-Preserving Text Analysis With GRU

Billions of text analysis requests containing private emails, personal text messages, and sensitive online reviews, are processed by recurrent neural networks (RNNs) deployed on public clouds every day. Although prior secure networks combine homomorphic encryption (HE) and garbled circuit (GC) to preserve users' privacy, naively adopting the HE and GC hybrid technique to implement RNNs suffers from long inference latency due to slow activation functions. In this paper, we present a HE and GC hybrid gated recurrent unit (GRU) network, CryptoGRU, for low-latency secure inferences. CryptoGRU replaces computationally expensive GC-based $tanh$ with fast GC-based $ReLU$, and then quantizes $sigmoid$ and $ReLU$ with a smaller bit length to accelerate activations in a GRU. We evaluate CryptoGRU with multiple GRU models trained on 4 public datasets. Experimental results show CryptoGRU achieves top-notch accuracy and improves the secure inference latency by up to $138\times$ over one of state-of-the-art secure networks on the Penn Treebank dataset.

Glyph: Fast and Accurately Training Deep Neural Networks on Encrypted Data

Big data is one of the cornerstones to enabling and training deep neural networks (DNNs). Because of the lack of expertise, to gain benefits from their data, average users have to rely on and upload their private data to big data companies they may not trust. Due to the compliance, legal, or privacy constraints, most users are willing to contribute only their encrypted data, and lack interests or resources to join the training of DNNs in cloud. To train a DNN on encrypted data in a completely non-interactive way, a recent work proposes a fully homomorphic encryption (FHE)-based technique implementing all activations in the neural network by \textit{Brakerski-Gentry-Vaikuntanathan (BGV)}-based lookup tables. However, such inefficient lookup-table-based activations significantly prolong the training latency of privacy-preserving DNNs. In this paper, we propose, Glyph, a FHE-based scheme to fast and accurately train DNNs on encrypted data by switching between TFHE (Fast Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Torus) and BGV cryptosystems. Glyph uses logic-operation-friendly TFHE to implement nonlinear activations, while adopts vectorial-arithmetic-friendly BGV to perform multiply-accumulation (MAC) operations. Glyph further applies transfer learning on the training of DNNs to improve the test accuracy and reduce the number of MAC operations between ciphertext and ciphertext in convolutional layers. Our experimental results show Glyph obtains the state-of-the-art test accuracy, but reduces the training latency by $99\%$ over the prior FHE-based technique on various encrypted datasets.

Yelp Food Identification via Image Feature Extraction and Classification

Yelp has been one of the most popular local service search engine in US since 2004. It is powered by crowd-sourced text reviews and photo reviews. Restaurant customers and business owners upload photo images to Yelp, including reviewing or advertising either food, drinks, or inside and outside decorations. It is obviously not so effective that labels for food photos rely on human editors, which is an issue should be addressed by innovative machine learning approaches. In this paper, we present a simple but effective approach which can identify up to ten kinds of food via raw photos from the challenge dataset. We use 1) image pre-processing techniques, including filtering and image augmentation, 2) feature extraction via convolutional neural networks (CNN), and 3) three ways of classification algorithms. Then, we illustrate the classification accuracy by tuning parameters for augmentations, CNN, and classification. Our experimental results show this simple but effective approach to identify up to 10 food types from images.