Incremental Pseudo-Labeling for Black-Box Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Black-Box unsupervised domain adaptation (BBUDA) learns knowledge only with the prediction of target data from the source model without access to the source data and source model, which attempts to alleviate concerns about the privacy and security of data. However, incorrect pseudo-labels are prevalent in the prediction generated by the source model due to the cross-domain discrepancy, which may substantially degrade the performance of the target model. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach that incrementally selects high-confidence pseudo-labels to improve the generalization ability of the target model. Specifically, we first generate pseudo-labels using a source model and train a crude target model by a vanilla BBUDA method. Second, we iteratively select high-confidence data from the low-confidence data pool by thresholding the softmax probabilities, prototype labels, and intra-class similarity. Then, we iteratively train a stronger target network based on the crude target model to correct the wrongly labeled samples to improve the accuracy of the pseudo-label. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art black-box unsupervised domain adaptation performance on three benchmark datasets.

Frequency-Guided Multi-Level Human Action Anomaly Detection with Normalizing Flows

We introduce the task of human action anomaly detection (HAAD), which aims to identify anomalous motions in an unsupervised manner given only the pre-determined normal category of training action samples. Compared to prior human-related anomaly detection tasks which primarily focus on unusual events from videos, HAAD involves the learning of specific action labels to recognize semantically anomalous human behaviors. To address this task, we propose a normalizing flow (NF)-based detection framework where the sample likelihood is effectively leveraged to indicate anomalies. As action anomalies often occur in some specific body parts, in addition to the full-body action feature learning, we incorporate extra encoding streams into our framework for a finer modeling of body subsets. Our framework is thus multi-level to jointly discover global and local motion anomalies. Furthermore, to show awareness of the potentially jittery data during recording, we resort to discrete cosine transformation by converting the action samples from the temporal to the frequency domain to mitigate the issue of data instability. Extensive experimental results on two human action datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the baselines formed by adapting state-of-the-art human activity AD approaches to our task of HAAD.

An Efficient Reconstructed Differential Evolution Variant by Some of the Current State-of-the-art Strategies for Solving Single Objective Bound Constrained Problems

Complex single-objective bounded problems are often difficult to solve. In evolutionary computation methods, since the proposal of differential evolution algorithm in 1997, it has been widely studied and developed due to its simplicity and efficiency. These developments include various adaptive strategies, operator improvements, and the introduction of other search methods. After 2014, research based on LSHADE has also been widely studied by researchers. However, although recently proposed improvement strategies have shown superiority over their previous generation's first performance, adding all new strategies may not necessarily bring the strongest performance. Therefore, we recombine some effective advances based on advanced differential evolution variants in recent years and finally determine an effective combination scheme to further promote the performance of differential evolution. In this paper, we propose a strategy recombination and reconstruction differential evolution algorithm called reconstructed differential evolution (RDE) to solve single-objective bounded optimization problems. Based on the benchmark suite of the 2024 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC2024), we tested RDE and several other advanced differential evolution variants. The experimental results show that RDE has superior performance in solving complex optimization problems.

A Multi-In and Multi-Out Dendritic Neuron Model and its Optimization

Artificial neural networks (ANNs), inspired by the interconnection of real neurons, have achieved unprecedented success in various fields such as computer vision and natural language processing. Recently, a novel mathematical ANN model, known as the dendritic neuron model (DNM), has been proposed to address nonlinear problems by more accurately reflecting the structure of real neurons. However, the single-output design limits its capability to handle multi-output tasks, significantly lowering its applications. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-in and multi-out dendritic neuron model (MODN) to tackle multi-output tasks. Our core idea is to introduce a filtering matrix to the soma layer to adaptively select the desired dendrites to regress each output. Because such a matrix is designed to be learnable, MODN can explore the relationship between each dendrite and output to provide a better solution to downstream tasks. We also model a telodendron layer into MODN to simulate better the real neuron behavior. Importantly, MODN is a more general and unified framework that can be naturally specialized as the DNM by customizing the filtering matrix. To explore the optimization of MODN, we investigate both heuristic and gradient-based optimizers and introduce a 2-step training method for MODN. Extensive experimental results performed on 11 datasets on both binary and multi-class classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of MODN, with respect to accuracy, convergence, and generality.

Differentiable Search of Accurate and Robust Architectures

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are found to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, and various methods have been proposed for the defense. Among these methods, adversarial training has been drawing increasing attention because of its simplicity and effectiveness. However, the performance of the adversarial training is greatly limited by the architectures of target DNNs, which often makes the resulting DNNs with poor accuracy and unsatisfactory robustness. To address this problem, we propose DSARA to automatically search for the neural architectures that are accurate and robust after adversarial training. In particular, we design a novel cell-based search space specially for adversarial training, which improves the accuracy and the robustness upper bound of the searched architectures by carefully designing the placement of the cells and the proportional relationship of the filter numbers. Then we propose a two-stage search strategy to search for both accurate and robust neural architectures. At the first stage, the architecture parameters are optimized to minimize the adversarial loss, which makes full use of the effectiveness of the adversarial training in enhancing the robustness. At the second stage, the architecture parameters are optimized to minimize both the natural loss and the adversarial loss utilizing the proposed multi-objective adversarial training method, so that the searched neural architectures are both accurate and robust. We evaluate the proposed algorithm under natural data and various adversarial attacks, which reveals the superiority of the proposed method in terms of both accurate and robust architectures. We also conclude that accurate and robust neural architectures tend to deploy very different structures near the input and the output, which has great practical significance on both hand-crafting and automatically designing of accurate and robust neural architectures.

Scale-free Network-based Differential Evolution

Some recent research reveals that a topological structure in meta-heuristic algorithms can effectively enhance the interaction of population, and thus improve their performance. Inspired by it, we creatively investigate the effectiveness of using a scale-free network in differential evolution methods, and propose a scale-free network-based differential evolution method. The novelties of this paper include a scale-free network-based population structure and a new mutation operator designed to fully utilize the neighborhood information provided by a scale-free structure. The elite individuals and population at the latest generation are both employed to guide a global optimization process. In this manner, the proposed algorithm owns balanced exploration and exploitation capabilities to alleviate the drawbacks of premature convergence. Experimental and statistical analyses are performed on the CEC'17 benchmark function suite and three real world problems. Results demonstrate its superior effectiveness and efficiency in comparison with its competitive peers.