arXiv subjects

Wael AbdAlmageed

Publications and source records attributed to Wael AbdAlmageed.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Fully Differentiable Neuro-Soft-Symbolic Framework for Perceptual Task Planning

Perceptual planning tasks require two key capabilities: accurately perceiving uncertain scenes and planning valid action sequences following logical rules. Conventional methods convert perception into discrete symbolic facts and then plan, discarding perceptual uncertainty and severing task-level feedback to perception. We introduce a generic, fully differentiable neuro-soft-symbolic framework that connects visual perception and task planning within a single computational graph. The framework maintains a continuous soft symbolic state, lifts domain rules into a differentiable soft-$T_P$ transition operator, and optimizes action logits over a short planning horizon. Gradients from the planning objective can also update the perception parameters, allowing task-relevant perceptual representations to be refined during planning. On Blocksworld, our method solves 40/40 LatPlan-40 tasks and 596/600 PlanBench-600 tasks, compared with 33/40 for LatPlan and 587/600 for the reasoning-model baseline, while requiring substantially less computation and time. In the perceptual-uncertainty ablation, our method improves the success rate from 59\% with frozen perception to 83\%. We further conduct task-and-motion simulations on Blocksworld scenes, providing an execution-level validation of the compatibility between decoded task plans and downstream robotic motion execution.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

SoftReason: A Fully Differentiable Neuro-Soft-Symbolic Deductive Reasoning Architecture over High-Dimensional Perceptual Data

In many reasoning problems, the premises are not observed as discrete symbols, but must be inferred from high-dimensional inputs. Further, the predicate vocabulary, argument structure, and trusted evidence are supplied by a Knowledge Graph (KG), or rule definitions. Classical neuro-symbolic pipelines have a discrete interface between perception and deduction. We present a neuro-soft-symbolic architecture for differentiable deductive reasoning over latent perceptual facts and knowledge-provided predicates. SoftReason removes the gradient gap by representing the deductive state as a local soft interpretation tensor over candidate constants and predicates. Perception proposes probabilistic base facts, KG triples enter as high-confidence soft evidence, and every query anchor, predicate choice, and closure update remains differentiable. Our core innovation is a learned differentiable lift of the immediate-consequence operator. It uses predicate-definition embeddings and latent composition channels to form soft body-predicate mixtures, aggregate over all possible witnesses, propose query-conditioned head facts, and update the interpretation through a monotone probabilistic OR. We instantiate the framework on Knowledge-aware Visual Question Answering (KVQA), and demonstrates how SoftReason supports end-to-end perceptual grounding, KG evidence injection, and differentiable deductive closure in one trainable architecture.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

AS2 -- Attention-Based Soft Answer Sets: An End-to-End Differentiable Neuro-Soft-Symbolic Reasoning Architecture

Neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence (AI) systems typically couple a neural perception module to a discrete symbolic solver through a non-differentiable boundary, preventing constraint-satisfaction feedback from reaching the perception encoder during training. We introduce AS2 (Attention-Based Soft Answer Sets), a fully differentiable neuro-symbolic architecture that replaces the discrete solver with a soft, continuous approximation of the Answer Set Programming (ASP) immediate consequence operator $T_P$. AS2 maintains per-position probability distributions over a finite symbol domain throughout the forward pass and trains end-to-end by minimizing the fixed-point residual of a probabilistic lift of $T_P$, thereby differentiating through the constraint check without invoking an external solver at either training or inference time. The architecture is entirely free of conventional positional embeddings. Instead, it encodes problem structure through constraint-group membership embeddings that directly reflect the declarative ASP specification, making the model agnostic to arbitrary position indexing. On Visual Sudoku, AS2 achieves 99.89% cell accuracy and 100% constraint satisfaction (verified by Clingo) across 1,000 test boards, using a greedy constrained decoding procedure that requires no external solver. On MNIST Addition with $N \in \{2, 4, 8\}$ addends, AS2 achieves digit accuracy above 99.7% across all scales. These results demonstrate that a soft differentiable fixpoint operator, combined with constraint-aware attention and declarative constraint specification, can match or exceed pipeline and solver-based neuro-symbolic systems while maintaining full end-to-end differentiability.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Causal Representation Learning on High-Dimensional Data: Benchmarks, Reproducibility, and Evaluation Metrics

Causal representation learning (CRL) models aim to transform high-dimensional data into a latent space, enabling interventions to generate counterfactual samples or modify existing data based on the causal relationships among latent variables. To facilitate the development and evaluation of these models, a variety of synthetic and real-world datasets have been proposed, each with distinct advantages and limitations. For practical applications, CRL models must perform robustly across multiple evaluation directions, including reconstruction, disentanglement, causal discovery, and counterfactual reasoning, using appropriate metrics for each direction. However, this multi-directional evaluation can complicate model comparison, as a model may excel in some direction while under-performing in others. Another significant challenge in this field is reproducibility: the source code corresponding to published results must be publicly available, and repeated runs should yield performance consistent with the original reports. In this study, we critically analyzed the synthetic and real-world datasets currently employed in the literature, highlighting their limitations and proposing a set of essential characteristics for suitable datasets in CRL model development. We also introduce a single aggregate metric that consolidates performance across all evaluation directions, providing a comprehensive score for each model. Finally, we reviewed existing implementations from the literature and assessed them in terms of reproducibility, identifying gaps and best practices in the field.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

A Neuro-Symbolic Framework Combining Inductive and Deductive Reasoning for Autonomous Driving Planning

Existing end-to-end autonomous driving models rely heavily on purely data-driven inductive reasoning. This "black-box" nature leads to a lack of interpretability and absolute safety guarantees in complex, long-tail scenarios. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose a novel neuro-symbolic trajectory planning framework that seamlessly integrates rigorous deductive reasoning into end-to-end neural networks. Specifically, our framework utilizes a Large Language Model (LLM) to dynamically extract scene rules and employs an Answer Set Programming (ASP) solver for deterministic logical arbitration, generating safe and traceable discrete driving decisions. To bridge the gap between discrete symbols and continuous trajectories, we introduce a decision-conditioned decoding mechanism that transforms high-level logical decisions into learnable embedding vectors, simultaneously constraining the planning query and the physical initial velocity of a differentiable Kinematic Bicycle Model (KBM). By combining KBM-generated physical baseline trajectories with neural residual corrections, our approach inherently guarantees kinematic feasibility while ensuring a high degree of transparency. On the nuScenes benchmark, our method comprehensively outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline MomAD, reducing the L2 mean error to 0.57 m, decreasing the collision rate to 0.075%, and optimizing trajectory prediction consistency (TPC) to 0.47 m.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

A Critical Review of Predominant Bias in Neural Networks

Bias issues of neural networks garner significant attention along with its promising advancement. Among various bias issues, mitigating two predominant biases is crucial in advancing fair and trustworthy AI: (1) ensuring neural networks yields even performance across demographic groups, and (2) ensuring algorithmic decision-making does not rely on protected attributes. However, upon the investigation of \pc papers in the relevant literature, we find that there exists a persistent, extensive but under-explored confusion regarding these two types of biases. Furthermore, the confusion has already significantly hampered the clarity of the community and subsequent development of debiasing methodologies. Thus, in this work, we aim to restore clarity by providing two mathematical definitions for these two predominant biases and leveraging these definitions to unify a comprehensive list of papers. Next, we highlight the common phenomena and the possible reasons for the existing confusion. To alleviate the confusion, we provide extensive experiments on synthetic, census, and image datasets, to validate the distinct nature of these biases, distinguish their different real-world manifestations, and evaluate the effectiveness of a comprehensive list of bias assessment metrics in assessing the mitigation of these biases. Further, we compare these two types of biases from multiple dimensions including the underlying causes, debiasing methods, evaluation protocol, prevalent datasets, and future directions. Last, we provide several suggestions aiming to guide researchers engaged in bias-related work to avoid confusion and further enhance clarity in the community.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

TRIGS: Trojan Identification from Gradient-based Signatures

Training machine learning models can be very expensive or even unaffordable. This may be, for example, due to data limitations, such as unavailability or being too large, or computational power limitations. Therefore, it is a common practice to rely on open-source pre-trained models whenever possible.However, this practice is alarming from a security perspective. Pre-trained models can be infected with Trojan attacks, in which the attacker embeds a trigger in the model such that the model's behavior can be controlled by the attacker when the trigger is present in the input. In this paper, we present a novel method for detecting Trojan models. Our method creates a signature for a model based on activation optimization. A classifier is then trained to detect a Trojan model given its signature. We call our method TRIGS for TRojan Identification from Gradient-based Signatures. TRIGS achieves state-of-the-art performance on two public datasets of convolutional models. Additionally, we introduce a new challenging dataset of ImageNet models based on the vision transformer architecture. TRIGS delivers the best performance on the new dataset, surpassing the baseline methods by a large margin. Our experiments also show that TRIGS requires only a small amount of clean samples to achieve good performance, and works reasonably well even if the defender does not have prior knowledge about the attacker's model architecture. Our code and data are publicly available.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Look, Learn and Leverage (L$^3$): Mitigating Visual-Domain Shift and Discovering Intrinsic Relations via Symbolic Alignment

Modern deep learning models have demonstrated outstanding performance on discovering the underlying mechanisms when both visual appearance and intrinsic relations (e.g., causal structure) data are sufficient, such as Disentangled Representation Learning (DRL), Causal Representation Learning (CRL) and Visual Question Answering (VQA) methods. However, generalization ability of these models is challenged when the visual domain shifts and the relations data is absent during finetuning. To address this challenge, we propose a novel learning framework, Look, Learn and Leverage (L$^3$), which decomposes the learning process into three distinct phases and systematically utilize the class-agnostic segmentation masks as the common symbolic space to align visual domains. Thus, a relations discovery model can be trained on the source domain, and when the visual domain shifts and the intrinsic relations are absent, the pretrained relations discovery model can be directly reused and maintain a satisfactory performance. Extensive performance evaluations are conducted on three different tasks: DRL, CRL and VQA, and show outstanding results on all three tasks, which reveals the advantages of L$^3$.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

An Investigation on The Position Encoding in Vision-Based Dynamics Prediction

Despite the success of vision-based dynamics prediction models, which predict object states by utilizing RGB images and simple object descriptions, they were challenged by environment misalignments. Although the literature has demonstrated that unifying visual domains with both environment context and object abstract, such as semantic segmentation and bounding boxes, can effectively mitigate the visual domain misalignment challenge, discussions were focused on the abstract of environment context, and the insight of using bounding box as the object abstract is under-explored. Furthermore, we notice that, as empirical results shown in the literature, even when the visual appearance of objects is removed, object bounding boxes alone, instead of being directly fed into the network, can indirectly provide sufficient position information via the Region of Interest Pooling operation for dynamics prediction. However, previous literature overlooked discussions regarding how such position information is implicitly encoded in the dynamics prediction model. Thus, in this paper, we provide detailed studies to investigate the process and necessary conditions for encoding position information via using the bounding box as the object abstract into output features. Furthermore, we study the limitation of solely using object abstracts, such that the dynamics prediction performance will be jeopardized when the environment context varies.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Unsupervised Multimodal Deepfake Detection Using Intra- and Cross-Modal Inconsistencies

Deepfake videos present an increasing threat to society with potentially negative impact on criminal justice, democracy, and personal safety and privacy. Meanwhile, detecting deepfakes, at scale, remains a very challenging task that often requires labeled training data from existing deepfake generation methods. Further, even the most accurate supervised deepfake detection methods do not generalize to deepfakes generated using new generation methods. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised method for detecting deepfake videos by directly identifying intra-modal and cross-modal inconsistency between video segments. The fundamental hypothesis behind the proposed detection method is that motion or identity inconsistencies are inevitable in deepfake videos. We will mathematically and empirically support this hypothesis, and then proceed to constructing our method grounded in our theoretical analysis. Our proposed method outperforms prior state-of-the-art unsupervised deepfake detection methods on the challenging FakeAVCeleb dataset, and also has several additional advantages: it is scalable because it does not require pristine (real) samples for each identity during inference and therefore can apply to arbitrarily many identities, generalizable because it is trained only on real videos and therefore does not rely on a particular deepfake method, reliable because it does not rely on any likelihood estimation in high dimensions, and explainable because it can pinpoint the exact location of modality inconsistencies which are then verifiable by a human expert.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

ManiFPT: Defining and Analyzing Fingerprints of Generative Models

Recent works have shown that generative models leave traces of their underlying generative process on the generated samples, broadly referred to as fingerprints of a generative model, and have studied their utility in detecting synthetic images from real ones. However, the extend to which these fingerprints can distinguish between various types of synthetic image and help identify the underlying generative process remain under-explored. In particular, the very definition of a fingerprint remains unclear, to our knowledge. To that end, in this work, we formalize the definition of artifact and fingerprint in generative models, propose an algorithm for computing them in practice, and finally study its effectiveness in distinguishing a large array of different generative models. We find that using our proposed definition can significantly improve the performance on the task of identifying the underlying generative process from samples (model attribution) compared to existing methods. Additionally, we study the structure of the fingerprints, and observe that it is very predictive of the effect of different design choices on the generative process.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Information-Theoretic Bounds on The Removal of Attribute-Specific Bias From Neural Networks

Ensuring a neural network is not relying on protected attributes (e.g., race, sex, age) for predictions is crucial in advancing fair and trustworthy AI. While several promising methods for removing attribute bias in neural networks have been proposed, their limitations remain under-explored. In this work, we mathematically and empirically reveal an important limitation of attribute bias removal methods in presence of strong bias. Specifically, we derive a general non-vacuous information-theoretical upper bound on the performance of any attribute bias removal method in terms of the bias strength. We provide extensive experiments on synthetic, image, and census datasets to verify the theoretical bound and its consequences in practice. Our findings show that existing attribute bias removal methods are effective only when the inherent bias in the dataset is relatively weak, thus cautioning against the use of these methods in smaller datasets where strong attribute bias can occur, and advocating the need for methods that can overcome this limitation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

SABAF: Removing Strong Attribute Bias from Neural Networks with Adversarial Filtering

Ensuring a neural network is not relying on protected attributes (e.g., race, sex, age) for prediction is crucial in advancing fair and trustworthy AI. While several promising methods for removing attribute bias in neural networks have been proposed, their limitations remain under-explored. To that end, in this work, we mathematically and empirically reveal the limitation of existing attribute bias removal methods in presence of strong bias and propose a new method that can mitigate this limitation. Specifically, we first derive a general non-vacuous information-theoretical upper bound on the performance of any attribute bias removal method in terms of the bias strength, revealing that they are effective only when the inherent bias in the dataset is relatively weak. Next, we derive a necessary condition for the existence of any method that can remove attribute bias regardless of the bias strength. Inspired by this condition, we then propose a new method using an adversarial objective that directly filters out protected attributes in the input space while maximally preserving all other attributes, without requiring any specific target label. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both strong and moderate bias settings. We provide extensive experiments on synthetic, image, and census datasets, to verify the derived theoretical bound and its consequences in practice, and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method in removing strong attribute bias.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Shadow Datasets, New challenging datasets for Causal Representation Learning

Discovering causal relations among semantic factors is an emergent topic in representation learning. Most causal representation learning (CRL) methods are fully supervised, which is impractical due to costly labeling. To resolve this restriction, weakly supervised CRL methods were introduced. To evaluate CRL performance, four existing datasets, Pendulum, Flow, CelebA(BEARD) and CelebA(SMILE), are utilized. However, existing CRL datasets are limited to simple graphs with few generative factors. Thus we propose two new datasets with a larger number of diverse generative factors and more sophisticated causal graphs. In addition, current real datasets, CelebA(BEARD) and CelebA(SMILE), the originally proposed causal graphs are not aligned with the dataset distributions. Thus, we propose modifications to them.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Emergent Asymmetry of Precision and Recall for Measuring Fidelity and Diversity of Generative Models in High Dimensions

Precision and Recall are two prominent metrics of generative performance, which were proposed to separately measure the fidelity and diversity of generative models. Given their central role in comparing and improving generative models, understanding their limitations are crucially important. To that end, in this work, we identify a critical flaw in the common approximation of these metrics using k-nearest-neighbors, namely, that the very interpretations of fidelity and diversity that are assigned to Precision and Recall can fail in high dimensions, resulting in very misleading conclusions. Specifically, we empirically and theoretically show that as the number of dimensions grows, two model distributions with supports at equal point-wise distance from the support of the real distribution, can have vastly different Precision and Recall regardless of their respective distributions, hence an emergent asymmetry in high dimensions. Based on our theoretical insights, we then provide simple yet effective modifications to these metrics to construct symmetric metrics regardless of the number of dimensions. Finally, we provide experiments on real-world datasets to illustrate that the identified flaw is not merely a pathological case, and that our proposed metrics are effective in alleviating its impact.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

A Critical View of Vision-Based Long-Term Dynamics Prediction Under Environment Misalignment

Dynamics prediction, which is the problem of predicting future states of scene objects based on current and prior states, is drawing increasing attention as an instance of learning physics. To solve this problem, Region Proposal Convolutional Interaction Network (RPCIN), a vision-based model, was proposed and achieved state-of-the-art performance in long-term prediction. RPCIN only takes raw images and simple object descriptions, such as the bounding box and segmentation mask of each object, as input. However, despite its success, the model's capability can be compromised under conditions of environment misalignment. In this paper, we investigate two challenging conditions for environment misalignment: Cross-Domain and Cross-Context by proposing four datasets that are designed for these challenges: SimB-Border, SimB-Split, BlenB-Border, and BlenB-Split. The datasets cover two domains and two contexts. Using RPCIN as a probe, experiments conducted on the combinations of the proposed datasets reveal potential weaknesses of the vision-based long-term dynamics prediction model. Furthermore, we propose a promising direction to mitigate the Cross-Domain challenge and provide concrete evidence supporting such a direction, which provides dramatic alleviation of the challenge on the proposed datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Do-Operation Guided Causal Representation Learning with Reduced Supervision Strength

Causal representation learning has been proposed to encode relationships between factors presented in the high dimensional data. However, existing methods suffer from merely using a large amount of labeled data and ignore the fact that samples generated by the same causal mechanism follow the same causal relationships. In this paper, we seek to explore such information by leveraging do-operation to reduce supervision strength. We propose a framework that implements do-operation by swapping latent cause and effect factors encoded from a pair of inputs. Moreover, we also identify the inadequacy of existing causal representation metrics empirically and theoretically and introduce new metrics for better evaluation. Experiments conducted on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the superiorities of our method compared with state-of-the-art methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

MONet: Multi-scale Overlap Network for Duplication Detection in Biomedical Images

Manipulation of biomedical images to misrepresent experimental results has plagued the biomedical community for a while. Recent interest in the problem led to the curation of a dataset and associated tasks to promote the development of biomedical forensic methods. Of these, the largest manipulation detection task focuses on the detection of duplicated regions between images. Traditional computer-vision based forensic models trained on natural images are not designed to overcome the challenges presented by biomedical images. We propose a multi-scale overlap detection model to detect duplicated image regions. Our model is structured to find duplication hierarchically, so as to reduce the number of patch operations. It achieves state-of-the-art performance overall and on multiple biomedical image categories.

cs.CV↗