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Karthik Nandakumar

Publications and source records attributed to Karthik Nandakumar.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

Collaborative Learning of Anomalies with Privacy (CLAP) for Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection: A New Baseline

Unsupervised (US) video anomaly detection (VAD) in surveillance applications is gaining more popularity recently due to its practical real-world applications. As surveillance videos are privacy sensitive and the availability of large-scale video data may enable better US-VAD systems, collaborative learning can be highly rewarding in this setting. However, due to the extremely challenging nature of the US-VAD task, where learning is carried out without any annotations, privacy-preserving collaborative learning of US-VAD systems has not been studied yet. In this paper, we propose a new baseline for anomaly detection capable of localizing anomalous events in complex surveillance videos in a fully unsupervised fashion without any labels on a privacy-preserving participant-based distributed training configuration. Additionally, we propose three new evaluation protocols to benchmark anomaly detection approaches on various scenarios of collaborations and data availability. Based on these protocols, we modify existing VAD datasets to extensively evaluate our approach as well as existing US SOTA methods on two large-scale datasets including UCF-Crime and XD-Violence. All proposed evaluation protocols, dataset splits, and codes are available here: https://github.com/AnasEmad11/CLAP

cs.CV↗

SurvRNC: Learning Ordered Representations for Survival Prediction using Rank-N-Contrast

Predicting the likelihood of survival is of paramount importance for individuals diagnosed with cancer as it provides invaluable information regarding prognosis at an early stage. This knowledge enables the formulation of effective treatment plans that lead to improved patient outcomes. In the past few years, deep learning models have provided a feasible solution for assessing medical images, electronic health records, and genomic data to estimate cancer risk scores. However, these models often fall short of their potential because they struggle to learn regression-aware feature representations. In this study, we propose Survival Rank-N Contrast (SurvRNC) method, which introduces a loss function as a regularizer to obtain an ordered representation based on the survival times. This function can handle censored data and can be incorporated into any survival model to ensure that the learned representation is ordinal. The model was extensively evaluated on a HEad \& NeCK TumOR (HECKTOR) segmentation and the outcome-prediction task dataset. We demonstrate that using the SurvRNC method for training can achieve higher performance on different deep survival models. Additionally, it outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 3.6% on the concordance index. The code is publicly available on https://github.com/numanai/SurvRNC

cs.CV↗

Dirichlet-based Uncertainty Quantification for Personalized Federated Learning with Improved Posterior Networks

In modern federated learning, one of the main challenges is to account for inherent heterogeneity and the diverse nature of data distributions for different clients. This problem is often addressed by introducing personalization of the models towards the data distribution of the particular client. However, a personalized model might be unreliable when applied to the data that is not typical for this client. Eventually, it may perform worse for these data than the non-personalized global model trained in a federated way on the data from all the clients. This paper presents a new approach to federated learning that allows selecting a model from global and personalized ones that would perform better for a particular input point. It is achieved through a careful modeling of predictive uncertainties that helps to detect local and global in- and out-of-distribution data and use this information to select the model that is confident in a prediction. The comprehensive experimental evaluation on the popular real-world image datasets shows the superior performance of the model in the presence of out-of-distribution data while performing on par with state-of-the-art personalized federated learning algorithms in the standard scenarios.

stat.ML↗

Byzantine-Tolerant Methods for Distributed Variational Inequalities

Robustness to Byzantine attacks is a necessity for various distributed training scenarios. When the training reduces to the process of solving a minimization problem, Byzantine robustness is relatively well-understood. However, other problem formulations, such as min-max problems or, more generally, variational inequalities, arise in many modern machine learning and, in particular, distributed learning tasks. These problems significantly differ from the standard minimization ones and, therefore, require separate consideration. Nevertheless, only one work (Adibi et al., 2022) addresses this important question in the context of Byzantine robustness. Our work makes a further step in this direction by providing several (provably) Byzantine-robust methods for distributed variational inequality, thoroughly studying their theoretical convergence, removing the limitations of the previous work, and providing numerical comparisons supporting the theoretical findings.

cs.LG↗

A Coarse-to-Fine Pseudo-Labeling (C2FPL) Framework for Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection

Detection of anomalous events in videos is an important problem in applications such as surveillance. Video anomaly detection (VAD) is well-studied in the one-class classification (OCC) and weakly supervised (WS) settings. However, fully unsupervised (US) video anomaly detection methods, which learn a complete system without any annotation or human supervision, have not been explored in depth. This is because the lack of any ground truth annotations significantly increases the magnitude of the VAD challenge. To address this challenge, we propose a simple-but-effective two-stage pseudo-label generation framework that produces segment-level (normal/anomaly) pseudo-labels, which can be further used to train a segment-level anomaly detector in a supervised manner. The proposed coarse-to-fine pseudo-label (C2FPL) generator employs carefully-designed hierarchical divisive clustering and statistical hypothesis testing to identify anomalous video segments from a set of completely unlabeled videos. The trained anomaly detector can be directly applied on segments of an unseen test video to obtain segment-level, and subsequently, frame-level anomaly predictions. Extensive studies on two large-scale public-domain datasets, UCF-Crime and XD-Violence, demonstrate that the proposed unsupervised approach achieves superior performance compared to all existing OCC and US methods , while yielding comparable performance to the state-of-the-art WS methods.

cs.CV↗

FLIP: Cross-domain Face Anti-spoofing with Language Guidance

Face anti-spoofing (FAS) or presentation attack detection is an essential component of face recognition systems deployed in security-critical applications. Existing FAS methods have poor generalizability to unseen spoof types, camera sensors, and environmental conditions. Recently, vision transformer (ViT) models have been shown to be effective for the FAS task due to their ability to capture long-range dependencies among image patches. However, adaptive modules or auxiliary loss functions are often required to adapt pre-trained ViT weights learned on large-scale datasets such as ImageNet. In this work, we first show that initializing ViTs with multimodal (e.g., CLIP) pre-trained weights improves generalizability for the FAS task, which is in line with the zero-shot transfer capabilities of vision-language pre-trained (VLP) models. We then propose a novel approach for robust cross-domain FAS by grounding visual representations with the help of natural language. Specifically, we show that aligning the image representation with an ensemble of class descriptions (based on natural language semantics) improves FAS generalizability in low-data regimes. Finally, we propose a multimodal contrastive learning strategy to boost feature generalization further and bridge the gap between source and target domains. Extensive experiments on three standard protocols demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, achieving better zero-shot transfer performance than five-shot transfer of adaptive ViTs. Code: https://github.com/koushiksrivats/FLIP

cs.CV↗

FedSIS: Federated Split Learning with Intermediate Representation Sampling for Privacy-preserving Generalized Face Presentation Attack Detection

Lack of generalization to unseen domains/attacks is the Achilles heel of most face presentation attack detection (FacePAD) algorithms. Existing attempts to enhance the generalizability of FacePAD solutions assume that data from multiple source domains are available with a single entity to enable centralized training. In practice, data from different source domains may be collected by diverse entities, who are often unable to share their data due to legal and privacy constraints. While collaborative learning paradigms such as federated learning (FL) can overcome this problem, standard FL methods are ill-suited for domain generalization because they struggle to surmount the twin challenges of handling non-iid client data distributions during training and generalizing to unseen domains during inference. In this work, a novel framework called Federated Split learning with Intermediate representation Sampling (FedSIS) is introduced for privacy-preserving domain generalization. In FedSIS, a hybrid Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture is learned using a combination of FL and split learning to achieve robustness against statistical heterogeneity in the client data distributions without any sharing of raw data (thereby preserving privacy). To further improve generalization to unseen domains, a novel feature augmentation strategy called intermediate representation sampling is employed, and discriminative information from intermediate blocks of a ViT is distilled using a shared adapter network. The FedSIS approach has been evaluated on two well-known benchmarks for cross-domain FacePAD to demonstrate that it is possible to achieve state-of-the-art generalization performance without data sharing. Code: https://github.com/Naiftt/FedSIS

cs.CV↗

DCTM: Dilated Convolutional Transformer Model for Multimodal Engagement Estimation in Conversation

Conversational engagement estimation is posed as a regression problem, entailing the identification of the favorable attention and involvement of the participants in the conversation. This task arises as a crucial pursuit to gain insights into human's interaction dynamics and behavior patterns within a conversation. In this research, we introduce a dilated convolutional Transformer for modeling and estimating human engagement in the MULTIMEDIATE 2023 competition. Our proposed system surpasses the baseline models, exhibiting a noteworthy $7$\% improvement on test set and $4$\% on validation set. Moreover, we employ different modality fusion mechanism and show that for this type of data, a simple concatenated method with self-attention fusion gains the best performance.

cs.MM↗

FeSViBS: Federated Split Learning of Vision Transformer with Block Sampling

Data scarcity is a significant obstacle hindering the learning of powerful machine learning models in critical healthcare applications. Data-sharing mechanisms among multiple entities (e.g., hospitals) can accelerate model training and yield more accurate predictions. Recently, approaches such as Federated Learning (FL) and Split Learning (SL) have facilitated collaboration without the need to exchange private data. In this work, we propose a framework for medical imaging classification tasks called Federated Split learning of Vision transformer with Block Sampling (FeSViBS). The FeSViBS framework builds upon the existing federated split vision transformer and introduces a block sampling module, which leverages intermediate features extracted by the Vision Transformer (ViT) at the server. This is achieved by sampling features (patch tokens) from an intermediate transformer block and distilling their information content into a pseudo class token before passing them back to the client. These pseudo class tokens serve as an effective feature augmentation strategy and enhances the generalizability of the learned model. We demonstrate the utility of our proposed method compared to other SL and FL approaches on three publicly available medical imaging datasets: HAM1000, BloodMNIST, and Fed-ISIC2019, under both IID and non-IID settings. Code: https://github.com/faresmalik/FeSViBS

cs.CV↗

Evading Forensic Classifiers with Attribute-Conditioned Adversarial Faces

The ability of generative models to produce highly realistic synthetic face images has raised security and ethical concerns. As a first line of defense against such fake faces, deep learning based forensic classifiers have been developed. While these forensic models can detect whether a face image is synthetic or real with high accuracy, they are also vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Although such attacks can be highly successful in evading detection by forensic classifiers, they introduce visible noise patterns that are detectable through careful human scrutiny. Additionally, these attacks assume access to the target model(s) which may not always be true. Attempts have been made to directly perturb the latent space of GANs to produce adversarial fake faces that can circumvent forensic classifiers. In this work, we go one step further and show that it is possible to successfully generate adversarial fake faces with a specified set of attributes (e.g., hair color, eye size, race, gender, etc.). To achieve this goal, we leverage the state-of-the-art generative model StyleGAN with disentangled representations, which enables a range of modifications without leaving the manifold of natural images. We propose a framework to search for adversarial latent codes within the feature space of StyleGAN, where the search can be guided either by a text prompt or a reference image. We also propose a meta-learning based optimization strategy to achieve transferable performance on unknown target models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach can produce semantically manipulated adversarial fake faces, which are true to the specified attribute set and can successfully fool forensic face classifiers, while remaining undetectable by humans. Code: https://github.com/koushiksrivats/face_attribute_attack.

cs.CV↗

CLIP2Protect: Protecting Facial Privacy using Text-Guided Makeup via Adversarial Latent Search

The success of deep learning based face recognition systems has given rise to serious privacy concerns due to their ability to enable unauthorized tracking of users in the digital world. Existing methods for enhancing privacy fail to generate naturalistic images that can protect facial privacy without compromising user experience. We propose a novel two-step approach for facial privacy protection that relies on finding adversarial latent codes in the low-dimensional manifold of a pretrained generative model. The first step inverts the given face image into the latent space and finetunes the generative model to achieve an accurate reconstruction of the given image from its latent code. This step produces a good initialization, aiding the generation of high-quality faces that resemble the given identity. Subsequently, user-defined makeup text prompts and identity-preserving regularization are used to guide the search for adversarial codes in the latent space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that faces generated by our approach have stronger black-box transferability with an absolute gain of 12.06% over the state-of-the-art facial privacy protection approach under the face verification task. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for commercial face recognition systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/fahadshamshad/Clip2Protect.

cs.CV↗

Single-branch Network for Multimodal Training

With the rapid growth of social media platforms, users are sharing billions of multimedia posts containing audio, images, and text. Researchers have focused on building autonomous systems capable of processing such multimedia data to solve challenging multimodal tasks including cross-modal retrieval, matching, and verification. Existing works use separate networks to extract embeddings of each modality to bridge the gap between them. The modular structure of their branched networks is fundamental in creating numerous multimodal applications and has become a defacto standard to handle multiple modalities. In contrast, we propose a novel single-branch network capable of learning discriminative representation of unimodal as well as multimodal tasks without changing the network. An important feature of our single-branch network is that it can be trained either using single or multiple modalities without sacrificing performance. We evaluated our proposed single-branch network on the challenging multimodal problem (face-voice association) for cross-modal verification and matching tasks with various loss formulations. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed single-branch network over the existing methods in a wide range of experiments. Code: https://github.com/msaadsaeed/SBNet

cs.CV↗

Towards Building Text-To-Speech Systems for the Next Billion Users

Deep learning based text-to-speech (TTS) systems have been evolving rapidly with advances in model architectures, training methodologies, and generalization across speakers and languages. However, these advances have not been thoroughly investigated for Indian language speech synthesis. Such investigation is computationally expensive given the number and diversity of Indian languages, relatively lower resource availability, and the diverse set of advances in neural TTS that remain untested. In this paper, we evaluate the choice of acoustic models, vocoders, supplementary loss functions, training schedules, and speaker and language diversity for Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages. Based on this, we identify monolingual models with FastPitch and HiFi-GAN V1, trained jointly on male and female speakers to perform the best. With this setup, we train and evaluate TTS models for 13 languages and find our models to significantly improve upon existing models in all languages as measured by mean opinion scores. We open-source all models on the Bhashini platform.

cs.CL↗

On the Importance of Image Encoding in Automated Chest X-Ray Report Generation

Chest X-ray is one of the most popular medical imaging modalities due to its accessibility and effectiveness. However, there is a chronic shortage of well-trained radiologists who can interpret these images and diagnose the patient's condition. Therefore, automated radiology report generation can be a very helpful tool in clinical practice. A typical report generation workflow consists of two main steps: (i) encoding the image into a latent space and (ii) generating the text of the report based on the latent image embedding. Many existing report generation techniques use a standard convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for image encoding followed by a Transformer-based decoder for medical text generation. In most cases, CNN and the decoder are trained jointly in an end-to-end fashion. In this work, we primarily focus on understanding the relative importance of encoder and decoder components. Towards this end, we analyze four different image encoding approaches: direct, fine-grained, CLIP-based, and Cluster-CLIP-based encodings in conjunction with three different decoders on the large-scale MIMIC-CXR dataset. Among these encoders, the cluster CLIP visual encoder is a novel approach that aims to generate more discriminative and explainable representations. CLIP-based encoders produce comparable results to traditional CNN-based encoders in terms of NLP metrics, while fine-grained encoding outperforms all other encoders both in terms of NLP and clinical accuracy metrics, thereby validating the importance of image encoder to effectively extract semantic information. GitHub repository: https://github.com/mudabek/encoding-cxr-report-gen

cs.CV↗

Hate-CLIPper: Multimodal Hateful Meme Classification based on Cross-modal Interaction of CLIP Features

Hateful memes are a growing menace on social media. While the image and its corresponding text in a meme are related, they do not necessarily convey the same meaning when viewed individually. Hence, detecting hateful memes requires careful consideration of both visual and textual information. Multimodal pre-training can be beneficial for this task because it effectively captures the relationship between the image and the text by representing them in a similar feature space. Furthermore, it is essential to model the interactions between the image and text features through intermediate fusion. Most existing methods either employ multimodal pre-training or intermediate fusion, but not both. In this work, we propose the Hate-CLIPper architecture, which explicitly models the cross-modal interactions between the image and text representations obtained using Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) encoders via a feature interaction matrix (FIM). A simple classifier based on the FIM representation is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Hateful Memes Challenge (HMC) dataset with an AUROC of 85.8, which even surpasses the human performance of 82.65. Experiments on other meme datasets such as Propaganda Memes and TamilMemes also demonstrate the generalizability of the proposed approach. Finally, we analyze the interpretability of the FIM representation and show that cross-modal interactions can indeed facilitate the learning of meaningful concepts. The code for this work is available at https://github.com/gokulkarthik/hateclipper.

cs.CL↗

Self-omics: A Self-supervised Learning Framework for Multi-omics Cancer Data

We have gained access to vast amounts of multi-omics data thanks to Next Generation Sequencing. However, it is challenging to analyse this data due to its high dimensionality and much of it not being annotated. Lack of annotated data is a significant problem in machine learning, and Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods are typically used to deal with limited labelled data. However, there is a lack of studies that use SSL methods to exploit inter-omics relationships on unlabelled multi-omics data. In this work, we develop a novel and efficient pre-training paradigm that consists of various SSL components, including but not limited to contrastive alignment, data recovery from corrupted samples, and using one type of omics data to recover other omic types. Our pre-training paradigm improves performance on downstream tasks with limited labelled data. We show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art method in cancer type classification on the TCGA pan-cancer dataset in semi-supervised setting. Moreover, we show that the encoders that are pre-trained using our approach can be used as powerful feature extractors even without fine-tuning. Our ablation study shows that the method is not overly dependent on any pretext task component. The network architectures in our approach are designed to handle missing omic types and multiple datasets for pre-training and downstream training. Our pre-training paradigm can be extended to perform zero-shot classification of rare cancers.

cs.LG↗

Learning an Ensemble of Deep Fingerprint Representations

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown incredible promise in learning fixed-length representations from fingerprints. Since the representation learning is often focused on capturing specific prior knowledge (e.g., minutiae), there is no universal representation that comprehensively encapsulates all the discriminatory information available in a fingerprint. While learning an ensemble of representations can mitigate this problem, two critical challenges need to be addressed: (i) How to extract multiple diverse representations from the same fingerprint image? and (ii) How to optimally exploit these representations during the matching process? In this work, we train multiple instances of DeepPrint (a state-of-the-art DNN-based fingerprint encoder) on different transformations of the input image to generate an ensemble of fingerprint embeddings. We also propose a feature fusion technique that distills these multiple representations into a single embedding, which faithfully captures the diversity present in the ensemble without increasing the computational complexity. The proposed approach has been comprehensively evaluated on five databases containing rolled, plain, and latent fingerprints (NIST SD4, NIST SD14, NIST SD27, NIST SD302, and FVC2004 DB2A) and statistically significant improvements in accuracy have been consistently demonstrated across a range of verification as well as closed- and open-set identification settings. The proposed approach serves as a wrapper capable of improving the accuracy of any DNN-based recognition system.

cs.CV↗

Self-Ensembling Vision Transformer (SEViT) for Robust Medical Image Classification

Vision Transformers (ViT) are competing to replace Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for various computer vision tasks in medical imaging such as classification and segmentation. While the vulnerability of CNNs to adversarial attacks is a well-known problem, recent works have shown that ViTs are also susceptible to such attacks and suffer significant performance degradation under attack. The vulnerability of ViTs to carefully engineered adversarial samples raises serious concerns about their safety in clinical settings. In this paper, we propose a novel self-ensembling method to enhance the robustness of ViT in the presence of adversarial attacks. The proposed Self-Ensembling Vision Transformer (SEViT) leverages the fact that feature representations learned by initial blocks of a ViT are relatively unaffected by adversarial perturbations. Learning multiple classifiers based on these intermediate feature representations and combining these predictions with that of the final ViT classifier can provide robustness against adversarial attacks. Measuring the consistency between the various predictions can also help detect adversarial samples. Experiments on two modalities (chest X-ray and fundoscopy) demonstrate the efficacy of SEViT architecture to defend against various adversarial attacks in the gray-box (attacker has full knowledge of the target model, but not the defense mechanism) setting. Code: https://github.com/faresmalik/SEViT

cs.CV↗