Convergent Functions, Divergent Forms

We introduce LOKI, a compute-efficient framework for co-designing morphologies and control policies that generalize across unseen tasks. Inspired by biological adaptation -- where animals quickly adjust to morphological changes -- our method overcomes the inefficiencies of traditional evolutionary and quality-diversity algorithms. We propose learning convergent functions: shared control policies trained across clusters of morphologically similar designs in a learned latent space, drastically reducing the training cost per design. Simultaneously, we promote divergent forms by replacing mutation with dynamic local search, enabling broader exploration and preventing premature convergence. The policy reuse allows us to explore 780$\times$ more designs using 78% fewer simulation steps and 40% less compute per design. Local competition paired with a broader search results in a diverse set of high-performing final morphologies. Using the UNIMAL design space and a flat-terrain locomotion task, LOKI discovers a rich variety of designs -- ranging from quadrupeds to crabs, bipedals, and spinners -- far more diverse than those produced by prior work. These morphologies also transfer better to unseen downstream tasks in agility, stability, and manipulation domains (e.g., 2$\times$ higher reward on bump and push box incline tasks). Overall, our approach produces designs that are both diverse and adaptable, with substantially greater sample efficiency than existing co-design methods. (Project website: https://loki-codesign.github.io/)

Learning to Continually Learn with the Bayesian Principle

In the present era of deep learning, continual learning research is mainly focused on mitigating forgetting when training a neural network with stochastic gradient descent on a non-stationary stream of data. On the other hand, in the more classical literature of statistical machine learning, many models have sequential Bayesian update rules that yield the same learning outcome as the batch training, i.e., they are completely immune to catastrophic forgetting. However, they are often overly simple to model complex real-world data. In this work, we adopt the meta-learning paradigm to combine the strong representational power of neural networks and simple statistical models' robustness to forgetting. In our novel meta-continual learning framework, continual learning takes place only in statistical models via ideal sequential Bayesian update rules, while neural networks are meta-learned to bridge the raw data and the statistical models. Since the neural networks remain fixed during continual learning, they are protected from catastrophic forgetting. This approach not only achieves significantly improved performance but also exhibits excellent scalability. Since our approach is domain-agnostic and model-agnostic, it can be applied to a wide range of problems and easily integrated with existing model architectures.

T-GD: Transferable GAN-generated Images Detection Framework

Recent advancements in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) enable the generation of highly realistic images, raising concerns about their misuse for malicious purposes. Detecting these GAN-generated images (GAN-images) becomes increasingly challenging due to the significant reduction of underlying artifacts and specific patterns. The absence of such traces can hinder detection algorithms from identifying GAN-images and transferring knowledge to identify other types of GAN-images as well. In this work, we present the Transferable GAN-images Detection framework T-GD, a robust transferable framework for an effective detection of GAN-images. T-GD is composed of a teacher and a student model that can iteratively teach and evaluate each other to improve the detection performance. First, we train the teacher model on the source dataset and use it as a starting point for learning the target dataset. To train the student model, we inject noise by mixing up the source and target datasets, while constraining the weight variation to preserve the starting point. Our approach is a self-training method, but distinguishes itself from prior approaches by focusing on improving the transferability of GAN-image detection. T-GD achieves high performance on the source dataset by overcoming catastrophic forgetting and effectively detecting state-of-the-art GAN-images with only a small volume of data without any metadata information.

FDFtNet: Facing Off Fake Images using Fake Detection Fine-tuning Network

Creating fake images and videos such as "Deepfake" has become much easier these days due to the advancement in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Moreover, recent research such as the few-shot learning can create highly realistic personalized fake images with only a few images. Therefore, the threat of Deepfake to be used for a variety of malicious intents such as propagating fake images and videos becomes prevalent. And detecting these machine-generated fake images has been quite challenging than ever. In this work, we propose a light-weight robust fine-tuning neural network-based classifier architecture called Fake Detection Fine-tuning Network (FDFtNet), which is capable of detecting many of the new fake face image generation models, and can be easily combined with existing image classification networks and finetuned on a few datasets. In contrast to many existing methods, our approach aims to reuse popular pre-trained models with only a few images for fine-tuning to effectively detect fake images. The core of our approach is to introduce an image-based self-attention module called Fine-Tune Transformer that uses only the attention module and the down-sampling layer. This module is added to the pre-trained model and fine-tuned on a few data to search for new sets of feature space to detect fake images. We experiment with our FDFtNet on the GANsbased dataset (Progressive Growing GAN) and Deepfake-based dataset (Deepfake and Face2Face) with a small input image resolution of 64x64 that complicates detection. Our FDFtNet achieves an overall accuracy of 90.29% in detecting fake images generated from the GANs-based dataset, outperforming the state-of-the-art.