Cross-Scale MAE: A Tale of Multi-Scale Exploitation in Remote Sensing

Remote sensing images present unique challenges to image analysis due to the extensive geographic coverage, hardware limitations, and misaligned multi-scale images. This paper revisits the classical multi-scale representation learning problem but under the general framework of self-supervised learning for remote sensing image understanding. We present Cross-Scale MAE, a self-supervised model built upon the Masked Auto-Encoder (MAE).During pre-training, Cross-Scale MAE employs scale augmentation techniques and enforces cross-scale consistency constraints through both contrastive and generative losses to ensure consistent and meaningful representations well-suited for a wide range of downstream tasks. Further, our implementation leverages the xFormers library to accelerate network pre-training on a single GPU while maintaining the quality of learned representations. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that Cross-Scale MAE exhibits superior performance compared to standard MAE and other state-of-the-art remote sensing MAE methods.

The Sensitivity of Word Embeddings-based Author Detection Models to Semantic-preserving Adversarial Perturbations

Authorship analysis is an important subject in the field of natural language processing. It allows the detection of the most likely writer of articles, news, books, or messages. This technique has multiple uses in tasks related to authorship attribution, detection of plagiarism, style analysis, sources of misinformation, etc. The focus of this paper is to explore the limitations and sensitiveness of established approaches to adversarial manipulations of inputs. To this end, and using those established techniques, we first developed an experimental frame-work for author detection and input perturbations. Next, we experimentally evaluated the performance of the authorship detection model to a collection of semantic-preserving adversarial perturbations of input narratives. Finally, we compare and analyze the effects of different perturbation strategies, input and model configurations, and the effects of these on the author detection model.