arXiv subjects

Giacomo Boracchi

Publications and source records attributed to Giacomo Boracchi.

41 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Nonparametric and Online Change Detection in Multivariate Datastreams using QuantTree

We address the problem of online change detection in multivariate datastreams, and we introduce QuantTree Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (QT-EWMA), a nonparametric change-detection algorithm that can control the expected time before a false alarm, yielding a desired Average Run Length (ARL$_0$). Controlling false alarms is crucial in many applications and is rarely guaranteed by online change-detection algorithms that can monitor multivariate datastreams without knowing the data distribution. Like many change-detection algorithms, QT-EWMA builds a model of the data distribution, in our case a QuantTree histogram, from a stationary training set. To monitor datastreams even when the training set is extremely small, we propose QT-EWMA-update, which incrementally updates the QuantTree histogram during monitoring, always keeping the ARL$_0$ under control. Our experiments, performed on synthetic and real-world datastreams, demonstrate that QT-EWMA and QT-EWMA-update control the ARL$_0$ and the false alarm rate better than state-of-the-art methods operating in similar conditions, achieving lower or comparable detection delays.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Perception Visualization: Seeing Through the Eyes of a DNN

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems power the world we live in. Deep neural networks (DNNs) are able to solve tasks in an ever-expanding landscape of scenarios, but our eagerness to apply these powerful models leads us to focus on their performance and deprioritises our ability to understand them. Current research in the field of explainable AI tries to bridge this gap by developing various perturbation or gradient-based explanation techniques. For images, these techniques fail to fully capture and convey the semantic information needed to elucidate why the model makes the predictions it does. In this work, we develop a new form of explanation that is radically different in nature from current explanation methods, such as Grad-CAM. Perception visualization provides a visual representation of what the DNN perceives in the input image by depicting what visual patterns the latent representation corresponds to. Visualizations are obtained through a reconstruction model that inverts the encoded features, such that the parameters and predictions of the original models are not modified. Results of our user study demonstrate that humans can better understand and predict the system's decisions when perception visualizations are available, thus easing the debugging and deployment of deep models as trusted systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Scratch that! An Evolution-based Adversarial Attack against Neural Networks

We study black-box adversarial attacks for image classifiers in a constrained threat model, where adversaries can only modify a small fraction of pixels in the form of scratches on an image. We show that it is possible for adversaries to generate localized \textit{adversarial scratches} that cover less than $5\%$ of the pixels in an image and achieve targeted success rates of $98.77\%$ and $97.20\%$ on ImageNet and CIFAR-10 trained ResNet-50 models, respectively. We demonstrate that our scratches are effective under diverse shapes, such as straight lines or parabolic B\a'ezier curves, with single or multiple colors. In an extreme condition, in which our scratches are a single color, we obtain a targeted attack success rate of $66\%$ on CIFAR-10 with an order of magnitude fewer queries than comparable attacks. We successfully launch our attack against Microsoft's Cognitive Services Image Captioning API and propose various mitigation strategies.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2016

Change Detection in Multivariate Datastreams: Likelihood and Detectability Loss

We address the problem of detecting changes in multivariate datastreams, and we investigate the intrinsic difficulty that change-detection methods have to face when the data dimension scales. In particular, we consider a general approach where changes are detected by comparing the distribution of the log-likelihood of the datastream over different time windows. Despite the fact that this approach constitutes the frame of several change-detection methods, its effectiveness when data dimension scales has never been investigated, which is indeed the goal of our paper. We show that the magnitude of the change can be naturally measured by the symmetric Kullback-Leibler divergence between the pre- and post-change distributions, and that the detectability of a change of a given magnitude worsens when the data dimension increases. This problem, which we refer to as \emph{detectability loss}, is due to the linear relationship between the variance of the log-likelihood and the data dimension. We analytically derive the detectability loss on Gaussian-distributed datastreams, and empirically demonstrate that this problem holds also on real-world datasets and that can be harmful even at low data-dimensions (say, 10).

stat.ML↗

arXiv2014

RTI Goes Wild: Radio Tomographic Imaging for Outdoor People Detection and Localization

RF sensor networks are used to localize people indoor without requiring them to wear invasive electronic devices. These wireless mesh networks, formed by low-power radio transceivers, continuously measure the received signal strength (RSS) of the links. Radio Tomographic Imaging (RTI) is a technique that generates 2D images of the change in the electromagnetic field inside the area covered by the radio transceivers to spot the presence and movements of animates (e.g., people, large animals) or large metallic objects (e.g., cars). Here, we present a RTI system for localizing and tracking people outdoors. Differently than in indoor environments where the RSS does not change significantly with time unless people are found in the monitored area, the outdoor RSS signal is time-variant, e.g., due to rainfalls or wind-driven foliage. We present a novel outdoor RTI method that, despite the nonstationary noise introduced in the RSS data by the environment, achieves high localization accuracy and dramatically reduces the energy consumption of the sensing units. Experimental results demonstrate that the system accurately detects and tracks a person in real-time in a large forested area under varying environmental conditions, significantly reducing false positives, localization error and energy consumption compared to state-of-the-art RTI methods.

cs.NI↗