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Andrew Marshall

Publications and source records attributed to Andrew Marshall.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

Failing Gracefully: Mitigating Impact of Inevitable Robot Failures

Service robots operate in household environments shared with humans, pets, and everyday objects, where they are highly susceptible to failures such as software crashes, hardware degradation, or unpredictable interactions. While roboticists strive to minimize failures, some remain inevitable, making it critical to mitigate their potential consequences for safe and reliable deployment. This paper introduces a novel safety formulation that evaluates both the probability of impactful interactions between robots and surrounding entities during failures, and the severity of their outcomes. By quantifying the impact of failures on different entities, our approach enables robots to make informed planning decisions that balance safety with task efficiency. To support systematic evaluation, we also present FailBench, a MuJoCo-based simulation framework for studying robot-environment interactions under diverse failure modes, including sensing issues and actuator malfunctions. Together, our safety formulation and FailBench provide a foundation for developing safer and more robust motion plans and learned policies in real-world household environments.

cs.RO

Improving Medical Image Generative Models with Fr\'echet Distance Loss

Diffusion generative models have demonstrated immense potential for synthetic medical image generation. However, these models often struggle to capture complex morphological characteristics of heterogeneous tumors with irregular boundaries, limiting their utility for downstream clinical tasks such as segmentation. This limitation stems from the standard denoising objective: minimizing a per-pixel error, which smooths high-variance irregular structures characteristic of tumors. To address this, we propose finetuning these generative models with Fr\'echet Distance loss (FD-loss). FD-loss aligns the first and second order feature statistics of real and generated images in a pretrained encoder space, encouraging the generator to capture complex structural variations characteristic of heterogeneous tumors. We integrate FD-loss across diverse architectural settings, using both natural- and medical-image encoders on multiple liver and brain cancer datasets spanning CT and MRI modalities. Downstream segmentation networks trained on our FD-regularized synthetic data consistently achieve superior performance, improving tumor DSC by $>$$5\%$ over unregularized synthetic augmentation alone. Qualitative analysis suggests these gains are associated with more faithful tumor synthesis and fewer segmentation hallucinations. Our results show FD-loss as an effective regularizer for medical image generative models to improve clinical workflows.

cs.CV

AI-generated data contamination erodes pathological variability and diagnostic reliability

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly populating medical records with synthetic content, creating a feedback loop where future models are increasingly at risk of training on uncurated AI-generated data. However, the clinical consequences of this AI-generated data contamination remain unexplored. Here, we show that in the absence of mandatory human verification, this self-referential cycle drives a rapid erosion of pathological variability and diagnostic reliability. By analysing more than 800,000 synthetic data points across clinical text generation, vision-language reporting, and medical image synthesis, we find that models progressively converge toward generic phenotypes regardless of the model architecture. Specifically, rare but critical findings, including pneumothorax and effusions, vanish from the synthetic content generated by AI models, while demographic representations skew heavily toward middle-aged male phenotypes. Crucially, this degradation is masked by false diagnostic confidence; models continue to issue reassuring reports while failing to detect life-threatening pathology, with false reassurance rates tripling to 40%. Blinded physician evaluation confirms that this decoupling of confidence and accuracy renders AI-generated documentation clinically useless after just two generations. We systematically evaluate three mitigation strategies, finding that while synthetic volume scaling fails to prevent collapse, mixing real data with quality-aware filtering effectively preserves diversity. Ultimately, our results suggest that without policy-mandated human oversight, the deployment of generative AI threatens to degrade the very healthcare data ecosystems it relies upon.

cs.CY

Fr\'echet Radiomic Distance (FRD): A Versatile Metric for Comparing Medical Imaging Datasets

Determining whether two sets of images belong to the same or different distributions or domains is a crucial task in modern medical image analysis and deep learning; for example, to evaluate the output quality of image generative models. Currently, metrics used for this task either rely on the (potentially biased) choice of some downstream task, such as segmentation, or adopt task-independent perceptual metrics (e.g., Fr\'echet Inception Distance/FID) from natural imaging, which we show insufficiently capture anatomical features. To this end, we introduce a new perceptual metric tailored for medical images, FRD (Fr\'echet Radiomic Distance), which utilizes standardized, clinically meaningful, and interpretable image features. We show that FRD is superior to other image distribution metrics for a range of medical imaging applications, including out-of-domain (OOD) detection, the evaluation of image-to-image translation (by correlating more with downstream task performance as well as anatomical consistency and realism), and the evaluation of unconditional image generation. Moreover, FRD offers additional benefits such as stability and computational efficiency at low sample sizes, sensitivity to image corruptions and adversarial attacks, feature interpretability, and correlation with radiologist-perceived image quality. Additionally, we address key gaps in the literature by presenting an extensive framework for the multifaceted evaluation of image similarity metrics in medical imaging -- including the first large-scale comparative study of generative models for medical image translation -- and release an accessible codebase to facilitate future research. Our results are supported by thorough experiments spanning a variety of datasets, modalities, and downstream tasks, highlighting the broad potential of FRD for medical image analysis.

cs.CV

Enabling Normally-off In-Situ Computing with a Magneto-Electric FET-based SRAM Design

As an emerging post-CMOS Field Effect Transistor, Magneto-Electric FETs (MEFETs) offer compelling design characteristics for logic and memory applications, such as high-speed switching, low power consumption, and non-volatility. In this paper, for the first time, a non-volatile MEFET-based SRAM design named ME-SRAM is proposed for edge applications which can remarkably save the SRAM static power consumption in the idle state through a fast backup-restore process. To enable normally-off in-situ computing, the ME-SRAM cell is integrated into a novel processing-in-SRAM architecture that exploits a hardware-optimized bit-line computing approach for the execution of Boolean logic operations between operands housed in a memory sub-array within a single clock cycle. Our device-to-architecture evaluation results on Binary convolutional neural network acceleration show the robust performance of ME- SRAM while reducing energy consumption on average by a factor of 5.3 times compared to the best in-SRAM designs.

cs.AR

Adversarial Machine Learning -- Industry Perspectives

Based on interviews with 28 organizations, we found that industry practitioners are not equipped with tactical and strategic tools to protect, detect and respond to attacks on their Machine Learning (ML) systems. We leverage the insights from the interviews and we enumerate the gaps in perspective in securing machine learning systems when viewed in the context of traditional software security development. We write this paper from the perspective of two personas: developers/ML engineers and security incident responders who are tasked with securing ML systems as they are designed, developed and deployed ML systems. The goal of this paper is to engage researchers to revise and amend the Security Development Lifecycle for industrial-grade software in the adversarial ML era.

cs.CY

MERAM: Non-Volatile Cache Memory Based on Magneto-Electric FETs

Magneto-Electric FET (MEFET) is a recently developed post-CMOS FET, which offers intriguing characteristics for high speed and low-power design in both logic and memory applications. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a non-volatile 2T-1MEFET memory bit-cell with separate read and write paths. We show that with proper co-design at the device, cell and array levels, such a design is a promising candidate for fast non-volatile cache memory, termed as MERAM. To further evaluate its performance in memory system, we, for the first time, build a device-to-architecture cross-layer evaluation framework based on an experimentally-calibrated MEFET device model to quantitatively analyze and benchmark the proposed MERAM design with other memory technologies, including both volatile memory (i.e. SRAM, eDRAM) and other popular non-volatile emerging memory (i.e. ReRAM, STT-MRAM, and SOT-MRAM). The experiment results show that MERAM has a high state distinguishability with almost 36x magnitude difference in sense current. Results for the PARSEC benchmark suite indicate that as an L2 cache alternative, MERAM reduces Energy Area Latency (EAT) product on average by ~98\% and ~70\% compared with typical 6T SRAM and 2T SOT-MRAM platforms, respectively.

cs.ET

Unification modulo a partial theory of exponentiation

Modular exponentiation is a common mathematical operation in modern cryptography. This, along with modular multiplication at the base and exponent levels (to different moduli) plays an important role in a large number of key agreement protocols. In our earlier work, we gave many decidability as well as undecidability results for multiple equational theories, involving various properties of modular exponentiation. Here, we consider a partial subtheory focussing only on exponentiation and multiplication operators. Two main results are proved. The first result is positive, namely, that the unification problem for the above theory (in which no additional property is assumed of the multiplication operators) is decidable. The second result is negative: if we assume that the two multiplication operators belong to two different abelian groups, then the unification problem becomes undecidable.

cs.SC