arXiv subjects

Muhammad Shafique

Publications and source records attributed to Muhammad Shafique.

At least 181 records · Page 10Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

ODDR: Outlier Detection & Dimension Reduction Based Defense Against Adversarial Patches

Adversarial attacks present a significant challenge to the dependable deployment of machine learning models, with patch-based attacks being particularly potent. These attacks introduce adversarial perturbations in localized regions of an image, deceiving even well-trained models. In this paper, we propose Outlier Detection and Dimension Reduction (ODDR), a comprehensive defense strategy engineered to counteract patch-based adversarial attacks through advanced statistical methodologies. Our approach is based on the observation that input features corresponding to adversarial patches-whether naturalistic or synthetic-deviate from the intrinsic distribution of the remaining image data and can thus be identified as outliers. ODDR operates through a robust three-stage pipeline: Fragmentation, Segregation, and Neutralization. This model-agnostic framework is versatile, offering protection across various tasks, including image classification, object detection, and depth estimation, and is proved effective in both CNN-based and Transformer-based architectures. In the Fragmentation stage, image samples are divided into smaller segments, preparing them for the Segregation stage, where advanced outlier detection techniques isolate anomalous features linked to adversarial perturbations. The Neutralization stage then applies dimension reduction techniques to these outliers, effectively neutralizing the adversarial impact while preserving critical information for the machine learning task. Extensive evaluation on benchmark datasets against state-of-the-art adversarial patches underscores the efficacy of ODDR. Our method enhances model accuracy from 39.26% to 79.1% under the GoogleAp attack, outperforming leading defenses such as LGS (53.86%), Jujutsu (60%), and Jedi (64.34%).

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

A Two-Level Thermal Cycling-aware Task Mapping Technique for Reliability Management in Manycore Systems

Reliability management is one of the primary concerns in manycore systems design. Different aging mechanisms such as Negative-Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI), Electromigration (EM), and thermal cycling can reduce the reliability of these systems. However, state-of-the-art works mainly focused on NBTI and EM, whereas a few works have considered the thermal cycling effect. The thermal cycling effect can significantly aggravate the systems lifetime. Moreover, the thermal effects of cores on each other due to their adjacency may also influence the systems Mean Time to Failure (MTTF). This paper introduces a new technique to manage the reliability of manycore systems. The technique considers thermal cycling, adjacency of cores, and process variation-induced diversity of operating frequencies. It uses two levels of task mapping to improve system lifetime. At the first level, cores with close temperatures are packed into the same bin, and then, an arrived task is assigned to a bin with a similar temperature. Afterward in the second level, the task is assigned to a core inside the selected bin in the first level, based on performance requirements and the core frequency. Compared to the conventional TC-aware techniques, the proposed method is performed at a higher level (bins level) to reduce the thermal variations of cores inside a bin, and improves the system MTTFTC, making it a promising solution for manycore systems. The efficacy of our proposed technique is evaluated on 16, 32, 64, and 256 core systems using SPLASH2 and PARSEC benchmark suite applications. The results show up to 20% MTTFTC increment compared to the conventional thermal cycling-aware task mapping techniques.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

QADQN: Quantum Attention Deep Q-Network for Financial Market Prediction

Financial market prediction and optimal trading strategy development remain challenging due to market complexity and volatility. Our research in quantum finance and reinforcement learning for decision-making demonstrates the approach of quantum-classical hybrid algorithms to tackling real-world financial challenges. In this respect, we corroborate the concept with rigorous backtesting and validate the framework's performance under realistic market conditions, by including fixed transaction cost per trade. This paper introduces a Quantum Attention Deep Q-Network (QADQN) approach to address these challenges through quantum-enhanced reinforcement learning. Our QADQN architecture uses a variational quantum circuit inside a traditional deep Q-learning framework to take advantage of possible quantum advantages in decision-making. We gauge the QADQN agent's performance on historical data from major market indices, including the S&P 500. We evaluate the agent's learning process by examining its reward accumulation and the effectiveness of its experience replay mechanism. Our empirical results demonstrate the QADQN's superior performance, achieving better risk-adjusted returns with Sortino ratios of 1.28 and 1.19 for non-overlapping and overlapping test periods respectively, indicating effective downside risk management.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

APARATE: Adaptive Adversarial Patch for CNN-based Monocular Depth Estimation for Autonomous Navigation

In recent times, monocular depth estimation (MDE) has experienced significant advancements in performance, largely attributed to the integration of innovative architectures, i.e., convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformers. Nevertheless, the susceptibility of these models to adversarial attacks has emerged as a noteworthy concern, especially in domains where safety and security are paramount. This concern holds particular weight for MDE due to its critical role in applications like autonomous driving and robotic navigation, where accurate scene understanding is pivotal. To assess the vulnerability of CNN-based depth prediction methods, recent work tries to design adversarial patches against MDE. However, the existing approaches fall short of inducing a comprehensive and substantially disruptive impact on the vision system. Instead, their influence is partial and confined to specific local areas. These methods lead to erroneous depth predictions only within the overlapping region with the input image, without considering the characteristics of the target object, such as its size, shape, and position. In this paper, we introduce a novel adversarial patch named APARATE. This patch possesses the ability to selectively undermine MDE in two distinct ways: by distorting the estimated distances or by creating the illusion of an object disappearing from the perspective of the autonomous system. Notably, APARATE is designed to be sensitive to the shape and scale of the target object, and its influence extends beyond immediate proximity. APARATE, results in a mean depth estimation error surpassing $0.5$, significantly impacting as much as $99\%$ of the targeted region when applied to CNN-based MDE models. Furthermore, it yields a significant error of $0.34$ and exerts substantial influence over $94\%$ of the target region in the context of Transformer-based MDE.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

SSAP: A Shape-Sensitive Adversarial Patch for Comprehensive Disruption of Monocular Depth Estimation in Autonomous Navigation Applications

Monocular depth estimation (MDE) has advanced significantly, primarily through the integration of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and more recently, Transformers. However, concerns about their susceptibility to adversarial attacks have emerged, especially in safety-critical domains like autonomous driving and robotic navigation. Existing approaches for assessing CNN-based depth prediction methods have fallen short in inducing comprehensive disruptions to the vision system, often limited to specific local areas. In this paper, we introduce SSAP (Shape-Sensitive Adversarial Patch), a novel approach designed to comprehensively disrupt monocular depth estimation (MDE) in autonomous navigation applications. Our patch is crafted to selectively undermine MDE in two distinct ways: by distorting estimated distances or by creating the illusion of an object disappearing from the system's perspective. Notably, our patch is shape-sensitive, meaning it considers the specific shape and scale of the target object, thereby extending its influence beyond immediate proximity. Furthermore, our patch is trained to effectively address different scales and distances from the camera. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach induces a mean depth estimation error surpassing 0.5, impacting up to 99% of the targeted region for CNN-based MDE models. Additionally, we investigate the vulnerability of Transformer-based MDE models to patch-based attacks, revealing that SSAP yields a significant error of 0.59 and exerts substantial influence over 99% of the target region on these models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

PENDRAM: Enabling High-Performance and Energy-Efficient Processing of Deep Neural Networks through a Generalized DRAM Data Mapping Policy

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), a prominent type of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), have emerged as a state-of-the-art solution for solving machine learning tasks. To improve the performance and energy efficiency of CNN inference, the employment of specialized hardware accelerators is prevalent. However, CNN accelerators still face performance- and energy-efficiency challenges due to high off-chip memory (DRAM) access latency and energy, which are especially crucial for latency- and energy-constrained embedded applications. Moreover, different DRAM architectures have different profiles of access latency and energy, thus making it challenging to optimize them for high performance and energy-efficient CNN accelerators. To address this, we present PENDRAM, a novel design space exploration methodology that enables high-performance and energy-efficient CNN acceleration through a generalized DRAM data mapping policy. Specifically, it explores the impact of different DRAM data mapping policies and DRAM architectures across different CNN partitioning and scheduling schemes on the DRAM access latency and energy, then identifies the pareto-optimal design choices. The experimental results show that our DRAM data mapping policy improves the energy-delay-product of DRAM accesses in the CNN accelerator over other mapping policies by up to 96%. In this manner, our PENDRAM methodology offers high-performance and energy-efficient CNN acceleration under any given DRAM architectures for diverse embedded AI applications.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2024

Quantum Clustering for Cybersecurity

In this study, we develop a novel quantum machine learning (QML) framework to analyze cybersecurity vulnerabilities using data from the 2022 CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, which includes detailed information on vulnerability types, severity levels, common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) scores, and product specifics. Our framework preprocesses this data into a quantum-compatible format, enabling clustering analysis through our advanced quantum techniques, QCSWAPK-means and QkernelK-means. These quantum algorithms demonstrate superior performance compared to state-of-the-art classical clustering techniques like k-means and spectral clustering, achieving Silhouette scores of 0.491, Davies-Bouldin indices below 0.745, and Calinski-Harabasz scores exceeding 884, indicating more distinct and well-separated clusters. Our framework categorizes vulnerabilities into distinct groups, reflecting varying levels of risk severity: Cluster 0, primarily consisting of critical Microsoft-related vulnerabilities; Cluster 1, featuring medium severity vulnerabilities from various enterprise software vendors and network solutions; Cluster 2, with high severity vulnerabilities from Adobe, Cisco, and Google; and Cluster 3, encompassing vulnerabilities from Microsoft and Oracle with high to medium severity. These findings highlight the potential of QML to enhance the precision of vulnerability assessments and prioritization, advancing cybersecurity practices by enabling more strategic and proactive defense mechanisms.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

PO-QA: A Framework for Portfolio Optimization using Quantum Algorithms

Portfolio Optimization (PO) is a financial problem aiming to maximize the net gains while minimizing the risks in a given investment portfolio. The novelty of Quantum algorithms lies in their acclaimed potential and capability to solve complex problems given the underlying Quantum Computing (QC) infrastructure. Utilizing QC's applicable strengths to the finance industry's problems, such as PO, allows us to solve these problems using quantum-based algorithms such as Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) and Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). While the Quantum potential for finance is highly impactful, the architecture and composition of the quantum circuits have not yet been properly defined as robust financial frameworks/algorithms as state of the art in present literature for research and design development purposes. In this work, we propose a novel scalable framework, denoted PO-QA, to systematically investigate the variation of quantum parameters (such as rotation blocks, repetitions, and entanglement types) to observe their subtle effect on the overall performance. In our paper, the performance is measured and dictated by convergence to similar ground-state energy values for resultant optimal solutions by each algorithm variation set for QAOA and VQE to the exact eigensolver (classical solution). Our results provide effective insights into comprehending PO from the lens of Quantum Machine Learning in terms of convergence to the classical solution, which is used as a benchmark. This study paves the way for identifying efficient configurations of quantum circuits for solving PO and unveiling their inherent inter-relationships.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

S-E Pipeline: A Vision Transformer (ViT) based Resilient Classification Pipeline for Medical Imaging Against Adversarial Attacks

Vision Transformer (ViT) is becoming widely popular in automating accurate disease diagnosis in medical imaging owing to its robust self-attention mechanism. However, ViTs remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that may thwart the diagnosis process by leading it to intentional misclassification of critical disease. In this paper, we propose a novel image classification pipeline, namely, S-E Pipeline, that performs multiple pre-processing steps that allow ViT to be trained on critical features so as to reduce the impact of input perturbations by adversaries. Our method uses a combination of segmentation and image enhancement techniques such as Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE), Unsharp Masking (UM), and High-Frequency Emphasis filtering (HFE) as preprocessing steps to identify critical features that remain intact even after adversarial perturbations. The experimental study demonstrates that our novel pipeline helps in reducing the effect of adversarial attacks by 72.22% for the ViT-b32 model and 86.58% for the ViT-l32 model. Furthermore, we have shown an end-to-end deployment of our proposed method on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano board to demonstrate its practical use case in modern hand-held devices that are usually resource-constrained.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

RobQuNNs: A Methodology for Robust Quanvolutional Neural Networks against Adversarial Attacks

Recent advancements in quantum computing have led to the emergence of hybrid quantum neural networks, such as Quanvolutional Neural Networks (QuNNs), which integrate quantum and classical layers. While the susceptibility of classical neural networks to adversarial attacks is well-documented, the impact on QuNNs remains less understood. This study introduces RobQuNN, a new methodology to enhance the robustness of QuNNs against adversarial attacks, utilizing quantum circuit expressibility and entanglement capability alongside different adversarial strategies. Additionally, the study investigates the transferability of adversarial examples between classical and quantum models using RobQuNN, enhancing our understanding of cross-model vulnerabilities and pointing to new directions in quantum cybersecurity. The findings reveal that QuNNs exhibit up to 60\% higher robustness compared to classical networks for the MNIST dataset, particularly at low levels of perturbation. This underscores the potential of quantum approaches in improving security defenses. In addition, RobQuNN revealed that QuNN does not exhibit enhanced resistance or susceptibility to cross-model adversarial examples regardless of the quantum circuit architecture.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Robust ADAS: Enhancing Robustness of Machine Learning-based Advanced Driver Assistance Systems for Adverse Weather

In the realm of deploying Machine Learning-based Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ML-ADAS) into real-world scenarios, adverse weather conditions pose a significant challenge. Conventional ML models trained on clear weather data falter when faced with scenarios like extreme fog or heavy rain, potentially leading to accidents and safety hazards. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a novel approach: employing a Denoising Deep Neural Network as a preprocessing step to transform adverse weather images into clear weather images, thereby enhancing the robustness of ML-ADAS systems. The proposed method eliminates the need for retraining all subsequent Depp Neural Networks (DNN) in the ML-ADAS pipeline, thus saving computational resources and time. Moreover, it improves driver visualization, which is critical for safe navigation in adverse weather conditions. By leveraging the UNet architecture trained on an augmented KITTI dataset with synthetic adverse weather images, we develop the Weather UNet (WUNet) DNN to remove weather artifacts. Our study demonstrates substantial performance improvements in object detection with WUNet preprocessing under adverse weather conditions. Notably, in scenarios involving extreme fog, our proposed solution improves the mean Average Precision (mAP) score of the YOLOv8n from 4% to 70%.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

A Quality-Aware Voltage Overscaling Framework to Improve the Energy Efficiency and Lifetime of TPUs based on Statistical Error Modeling

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are a type of artificial intelligence models that are inspired by the structure and function of the human brain, designed to process and learn from large amounts of data, making them particularly well-suited for tasks such as image and speech recognition. However, applications of DNNs are experiencing emerging growth due to the deployment of specialized accelerators such as the Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). In large-scale deployments, the energy efficiency of such accelerators may become a critical concern. In the voltage overscaling (VOS) technique, the operating voltage of the system is scaled down beyond the nominal operating voltage, which increases the energy efficiency and lifetime of digital circuits. The VOS technique is usually performed without changing the frequency resulting in timing errors. However, some applications such as multimedia processing, including DNNs, have intrinsic resilience against errors and noise. In this paper, we exploit the inherent resilience of DNNs to propose a quality-aware voltage overscaling framework for TPUs, named X-TPU, which offers higher energy efficiency and lifetime compared to conventional TPUs. The X-TPU framework is composed of two main parts, a modified TPU architecture that supports a runtime voltage overscaling, and a statistical error modeling-based algorithm to determine the voltage of neurons such that the output quality is retained above a given user-defined quality threshold. We synthesized a single-neuron architecture using a 15-nm FinFET technology under various operating voltage levels. Then, we extracted different statistical error models for a neuron corresponding to those voltage levels. Using these models and the proposed algorithm, we determined the appropriate voltage of each neuron. Results show that running a DNN on X-TPU can achieve 32% energy saving for only 0.6% accuracy loss.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2024

A Comparative Analysis of Hybrid-Quantum Classical Neural Networks

Hybrid Quantum-Classical Machine Learning (ML) is an emerging field, amalgamating the strengths of both classical neural networks and quantum variational circuits on the current noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. This paper performs an extensive comparative analysis between different hybrid quantum-classical machine learning algorithms, namely Quantum Convolution Neural Network, Quanvolutional Neural Network and Quantum ResNet, for image classification. The experiments designed in this paper focus on different Quantum ML (QML) algorithms to better understand the accuracy variation across the different quantum architectures by implementing interchangeable quantum circuit layers, varying the repetition of such layers and their efficient placement. Such variations enable us to compare the accuracy across different architectural permutations of a given hybrid QML algorithm. The performance comparison of the hybrid models, based on the accuracy, provides us with an understanding of hybrid quantum-classical convergence in correlation with the quantum layer count and the qubit count variations in the circuit.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Studying the Impact of Quantum-Specific Hyperparameters on Hybrid Quantum-Classical Neural Networks

In current noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, hybrid quantum-classical neural networks (HQNNs) represent a promising solution that combines the strengths of classical machine learning with quantum computing capabilities. Compared to classical deep neural networks (DNNs), HQNNs present an additional set of hyperparameters, which are specific to quantum circuits. These quantum-specific hyperparameters, such as quantum circuit depth, number of qubits, type of entanglement, number of shots, and measurement observables, can significantly impact the behavior of the HQNNs and their capabilities to learn the given task. In this paper, we investigate the impact of these variations on different HQNN models for image classification tasks, implemented on the PennyLane framework. We aim to uncover intuitive and counter-intuitive learning patterns of HQNN models within granular levels of controlled quantum perturbations, to form a sound basis for their correlation to accuracy and training time. The outcome of our study opens new avenues for designing efficient HQNN algorithms and builds a foundational base for comprehending and identifying tunable hyperparameters of HQNN models that can lead to useful design implementation and usage.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

AdvQuNN: A Methodology for Analyzing the Adversarial Robustness of Quanvolutional Neural Networks

Recent advancements in quantum computing have led to the development of hybrid quantum neural networks (HQNNs) that employ a mixed set of quantum layers and classical layers, such as Quanvolutional Neural Networks (QuNNs). While several works have shown security threats of classical neural networks, such as adversarial attacks, their impact on QuNNs is still relatively unexplored. This work tackles this problem by designing AdvQuNN, a specialized methodology to investigate the robustness of HQNNs like QuNNs against adversarial attacks. It employs different types of Ansatzes as parametrized quantum circuits and different types of adversarial attacks. This study aims to rigorously assess the influence of quantum circuit architecture on the resilience of QuNN models, which opens up new pathways for enhancing the robustness of QuNNs and advancing the field of quantum cybersecurity. Our results show that, compared to classical convolutional networks, QuNNs achieve up to 60\% higher robustness for the MNIST and 40\% for FMNIST datasets.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

SNN4Agents: A Framework for Developing Energy-Efficient Embodied Spiking Neural Networks for Autonomous Agents

Recent trends have shown that autonomous agents, such as Autonomous Ground Vehicles (AGVs), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and mobile robots, effectively improve human productivity in solving diverse tasks. However, since these agents are typically powered by portable batteries, they require extremely low power/energy consumption to operate in a long lifespan. To solve this challenge, neuromorphic computing has emerged as a promising solution, where bio-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) use spikes from event-based cameras or data conversion pre-processing to perform sparse computations efficiently. However, the studies of SNN deployments for autonomous agents are still at an early stage. Hence, the optimization stages for enabling efficient embodied SNN deployments for autonomous agents have not been defined systematically. Toward this, we propose a novel framework called SNN4Agents that consists of a set of optimization techniques for designing energy-efficient embodied SNNs targeting autonomous agent applications. Our SNN4Agents employs weight quantization, timestep reduction, and attention window reduction to jointly improve the energy efficiency, reduce the memory footprint, optimize the processing latency, while maintaining high accuracy. In the evaluation, we investigate use cases of event-based car recognition, and explore the trade-offs among accuracy, latency, memory, and energy consumption. The experimental results show that our proposed framework can maintain high accuracy (i.e., 84.12% accuracy) with 68.75% memory saving, 3.58x speed-up, and 4.03x energy efficiency improvement as compared to the state-of-the-art work for NCARS dataset. In this manner, our SNN4Agents framework paves the way toward enabling energy-efficient embodied SNN deployments for autonomous agents.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

An Edge-based WiFi Fingerprinting Indoor Localization Using Convolutional Neural Network and Convolutional Auto-Encoder

With the ongoing development of Indoor Location-Based Services, the location information of users in indoor environments has been a challenging issue in recent years. Due to the widespread use of WiFi networks, WiFi fingerprinting has become one of the most practical methods of locating mobile users. In addition to localization accuracy, some other critical factors such as latency, and users' privacy should be considered in indoor localization systems. In this study, we propose a light Convolutional Neural Network-based method for edge devices (e.g. smartphones) to overcome the above issues by eliminating the need for a cloud/server in the localization system. The proposed method is evaluated for three different open datasets, i.e., UJIIndoorLoc, Tampere and UTSIndoorLoc, as well as for our collected dataset named SBUK-D to verify its scalability. We also evaluate performance efficiency of our localization method on an Android smartphone to demonstrate its applicability to edge devices. For UJIIndoorLoc dataset, our model obtains approximately 99% building accuracy, over 90% floor accuracy, and 9.5 m positioning mean error with the model size and inference time of 0.5 MB and 51 us, respectively, which demonstrate high accuracy in range of state of the art works as well as amenability to the resource-constrained edge devices.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

Exploring the Interplay of Interpretability and Robustness in Deep Neural Networks: A Saliency-guided Approach

Adversarial attacks pose a significant challenge to deploying deep learning models in safety-critical applications. Maintaining model robustness while ensuring interpretability is vital for fostering trust and comprehension in these models. This study investigates the impact of Saliency-guided Training (SGT) on model robustness, a technique aimed at improving the clarity of saliency maps to deepen understanding of the model's decision-making process. Experiments were conducted on standard benchmark datasets using various deep learning architectures trained with and without SGT. Findings demonstrate that SGT enhances both model robustness and interpretability. Additionally, we propose a novel approach combining SGT with standard adversarial training to achieve even greater robustness while preserving saliency map quality. Our strategy is grounded in the assumption that preserving salient features crucial for correctly classifying adversarial examples enhances model robustness, while masking non-relevant features improves interpretability. Our technique yields significant gains, achieving a 35\% and 20\% improvement in robustness against PGD attack with noise magnitudes of $0.2$ and $0.02$ for the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, respectively, while producing high-quality saliency maps.

cs.CV↗