AI Act for the Working Programmer

The European AI Act is a new, legally binding instrument that will enforce certain requirements on the development and use of AI technology potentially affecting people in Europe. It can be expected that the stipulations of the Act, in turn, are going to affect the work of many software engineers, software testers, data engineers, and other professionals across the IT sector in Europe and beyond. The 113 articles, 180 recitals, and 13 annexes that make up the Act cover 144 pages. This paper aims at providing an aid for navigating the Act from the perspective of some professional in the software domain, termed "the working programmer", who feels the need to know about the stipulations of the Act.

IPA-NeRF: Illusory Poisoning Attack Against Neural Radiance Fields

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) represents a significant advancement in computer vision, offering implicit neural network-based scene representation and novel view synthesis capabilities. Its applications span diverse fields including robotics, urban mapping, autonomous navigation, virtual reality/augmented reality, etc., some of which are considered high-risk AI applications. However, despite its widespread adoption, the robustness and security of NeRF remain largely unexplored. In this study, we contribute to this area by introducing the Illusory Poisoning Attack against Neural Radiance Fields (IPA-NeRF). This attack involves embedding a hidden backdoor view into NeRF, allowing it to produce predetermined outputs, i.e. illusory, when presented with the specified backdoor view while maintaining normal performance with standard inputs. Our attack is specifically designed to deceive users or downstream models at a particular position while ensuring that any abnormalities in NeRF remain undetectable from other viewpoints. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our Illusory Poisoning Attack, successfully presenting the desired illusory on the specified viewpoint without impacting other views. Notably, we achieve this attack by introducing small perturbations solely to the training set. The code can be found at https://github.com/jiang-wenxiang/IPA-NeRF.

Enhancing robustness of data-driven SHM models: adversarial training with circle loss

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is critical to safeguarding the safety and reliability of aerospace, civil, and mechanical infrastructure. Machine learning-based data-driven approaches have gained popularity in SHM due to advancements in sensors and computational power. However, machine learning models used in SHM are vulnerable to adversarial examples -- even small changes in input can lead to different model outputs. This paper aims to address this problem by discussing adversarial defenses in SHM. In this paper, we propose an adversarial training method for defense, which uses circle loss to optimize the distance between features in training to keep examples away from the decision boundary. Through this simple yet effective constraint, our method demonstrates substantial improvements in model robustness, surpassing existing defense mechanisms.

Eidos: Efficient, Imperceptible Adversarial 3D Point Clouds

Classification of 3D point clouds is a challenging machine learning (ML) task with important real-world applications in a spectrum from autonomous driving and robot-assisted surgery to earth observation from low orbit. As with other ML tasks, classification models are notoriously brittle in the presence of adversarial attacks. These are rooted in imperceptible changes to inputs with the effect that a seemingly well-trained model ends up misclassifying the input. This paper adds to the understanding of adversarial attacks by presenting Eidos, a framework providing Efficient Imperceptible aDversarial attacks on 3D pOint cloudS. Eidos supports a diverse set of imperceptibility metrics. It employs an iterative, two-step procedure to identify optimal adversarial examples, thereby enabling a runtime-imperceptibility trade-off. We provide empirical evidence relative to several popular 3D point cloud classification models and several established 3D attack methods, showing Eidos' superiority with respect to efficiency as well as imperceptibility.

A Survey on Visual Mamba

State space models (SSMs) with selection mechanisms and hardware-aware architectures, namely Mamba, have recently demonstrated significant promise in long-sequence modeling. Since the self-attention mechanism in transformers has quadratic complexity with image size and increasing computational demands, the researchers are now exploring how to adapt Mamba for computer vision tasks. This paper is the first comprehensive survey aiming to provide an in-depth analysis of Mamba models in the field of computer vision. It begins by exploring the foundational concepts contributing to Mamba's success, including the state space model framework, selection mechanisms, and hardware-aware design. Next, we review these vision mamba models by categorizing them into foundational ones and enhancing them with techniques such as convolution, recurrence, and attention to improve their sophistication. We further delve into the widespread applications of Mamba in vision tasks, which include their use as a backbone in various levels of vision processing. This encompasses general visual tasks, Medical visual tasks (e.g., 2D / 3D segmentation, classification, and image registration, etc.), and Remote Sensing visual tasks. We specially introduce general visual tasks from two levels: High/Mid-level vision (e.g., Object detection, Segmentation, Video classification, etc.) and Low-level vision (e.g., Image super-resolution, Image restoration, Visual generation, etc.). We hope this endeavor will spark additional interest within the community to address current challenges and further apply Mamba models in computer vision.

CA-Stream: Attention-based pooling for interpretable image recognition

Explanations obtained from transformer-based architectures in the form of raw attention, can be seen as a class-agnostic saliency map. Additionally, attention-based pooling serves as a form of masking the in feature space. Motivated by this observation, we design an attention-based pooling mechanism intended to replace Global Average Pooling (GAP) at inference. This mechanism, called Cross-Attention Stream (CA-Stream), comprises a stream of cross attention blocks interacting with features at different network depths. CA-Stream enhances interpretability in models, while preserving recognition performance.

DP-Net: Learning Discriminative Parts for image recognition

This paper presents Discriminative Part Network (DP-Net), a deep architecture with strong interpretation capabilities, which exploits a pretrained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) combined with a part-based recognition module. This system learns and detects parts in the images that are discriminative among categories, without the need for fine-tuning the CNN, making it more scalable than other part-based models. While part-based approaches naturally offer interpretable representations, we propose explanations at image and category levels and introduce specific constraints on the part learning process to make them more discrimative.

A Learning Paradigm for Interpretable Gradients

This paper studies interpretability of convolutional networks by means of saliency maps. Most approaches based on Class Activation Maps (CAM) combine information from fully connected layers and gradient through variants of backpropagation. However, it is well understood that gradients are noisy and alternatives like guided backpropagation have been proposed to obtain better visualization at inference. In this work, we present a novel training approach to improve the quality of gradients for interpretability. In particular, we introduce a regularization loss such that the gradient with respect to the input image obtained by standard backpropagation is similar to the gradient obtained by guided backpropagation. We find that the resulting gradient is qualitatively less noisy and improves quantitatively the interpretability properties of different networks, using several interpretability methods.

Revisiting Transferable Adversarial Image Examples: Attack Categorization, Evaluation Guidelines, and New Insights

Transferable adversarial examples raise critical security concerns in real-world, black-box attack scenarios. However, in this work, we identify two main problems in common evaluation practices: (1) For attack transferability, lack of systematic, one-to-one attack comparison and fair hyperparameter settings. (2) For attack stealthiness, simply no comparisons. To address these problems, we establish new evaluation guidelines by (1) proposing a novel attack categorization strategy and conducting systematic and fair intra-category analyses on transferability, and (2) considering diverse imperceptibility metrics and finer-grained stealthiness characteristics from the perspective of attack traceback. To this end, we provide the first large-scale evaluation of transferable adversarial examples on ImageNet, involving 23 representative attacks against 9 representative defenses. Our evaluation leads to a number of new insights, including consensus-challenging ones: (1) Under a fair attack hyperparameter setting, one early attack method, DI, actually outperforms all the follow-up methods. (2) A state-of-the-art defense, DiffPure, actually gives a false sense of (white-box) security since it is indeed largely bypassed by our (black-box) transferable attacks. (3) Even when all attacks are bounded by the same $L_p$ norm, they lead to dramatically different stealthiness performance, which negatively correlates with their transferability performance. Overall, our work demonstrates that existing problematic evaluations have indeed caused misleading conclusions and missing points, and as a result, hindered the assessment of the actual progress in this field.

A Stochastic Online Forecast-and-Optimize Framework for Real-Time Energy Dispatch in Virtual Power Plants under Uncertainty

Aggregating distributed energy resources in power systems significantly increases uncertainties, in particular caused by the fluctuation of renewable energy generation. This issue has driven the necessity of widely exploiting advanced predictive control techniques under uncertainty to ensure long-term economics and decarbonization. In this paper, we propose a real-time uncertainty-aware energy dispatch framework, which is composed of two key elements: (i) A hybrid forecast-and-optimize sequential task, integrating deep learning-based forecasting and stochastic optimization, where these two stages are connected by the uncertainty estimation at multiple temporal resolutions; (ii) An efficient online data augmentation scheme, jointly involving model pre-training and online fine-tuning stages. In this way, the proposed framework is capable to rapidly adapt to the real-time data distribution, as well as to target on uncertainties caused by data drift, model discrepancy and environment perturbations in the control process, and finally to realize an optimal and robust dispatch solution. The proposed framework won the championship in CityLearn Challenge 2022, which provided an influential opportunity to investigate the potential of AI application in the energy domain. In addition, comprehensive experiments are conducted to interpret its effectiveness in the real-life scenario of smart building energy management.