Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Wei Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Wei Huang.

At least 307 records · Page 17Linked to original sources

SAFARI: Versatile and Efficient Evaluations for Robustness of Interpretability

Interpretability of Deep Learning (DL) is a barrier to trustworthy AI. Despite great efforts made by the Explainable AI (XAI) community, explanations lack robustness -- indistinguishable input perturbations may lead to different XAI results. Thus, it is vital to assess how robust DL interpretability is, given an XAI method. In this paper, we identify several challenges that the state-of-the-art is unable to cope with collectively: i) existing metrics are not comprehensive; ii) XAI techniques are highly heterogeneous; iii) misinterpretations are normally rare events. To tackle these challenges, we introduce two black-box evaluation methods, concerning the worst-case interpretation discrepancy and a probabilistic notion of how robust in general, respectively. Genetic Algorithm (GA) with bespoke fitness function is used to solve constrained optimisation for efficient worst-case evaluation. Subset Simulation (SS), dedicated to estimate rare event probabilities, is used for evaluating overall robustness. Experiments show that the accuracy, sensitivity, and efficiency of our methods outperform the state-of-the-arts. Finally, we demonstrate two applications of our methods: ranking robust XAI methods and selecting training schemes to improve both classification and interpretation robustness.

cs.LG↗

What, Indeed, is an Achievable Provable Guarantee for Learning-Enabled Safety Critical Systems

Machine learning has made remarkable advancements, but confidently utilising learning-enabled components in safety-critical domains still poses challenges. Among the challenges, it is known that a rigorous, yet practical, way of achieving safety guarantees is one of the most prominent. In this paper, we first discuss the engineering and research challenges associated with the design and verification of such systems. Then, based on the observation that existing works cannot actually achieve provable guarantees, we promote a two-step verification method for the ultimate achievement of provable statistical guarantees.

cs.LG↗

FTFDNet: Learning to Detect Talking Face Video Manipulation with Tri-Modality Interaction

DeepFake based digital facial forgery is threatening public media security, especially when lip manipulation has been used in talking face generation, and the difficulty of fake video detection is further improved. By only changing lip shape to match the given speech, the facial features of identity are hard to be discriminated in such fake talking face videos. Together with the lack of attention on audio stream as the prior knowledge, the detection failure of fake talking face videos also becomes inevitable. It's found that the optical flow of the fake talking face video is disordered especially in the lip region while the optical flow of the real video changes regularly, which means the motion feature from optical flow is useful to capture manipulation cues. In this study, a fake talking face detection network (FTFDNet) is proposed by incorporating visual, audio and motion features using an efficient cross-modal fusion (CMF) module. Furthermore, a novel audio-visual attention mechanism (AVAM) is proposed to discover more informative features, which can be seamlessly integrated into any audio-visual CNN architecture by modularization. With the additional AVAM, the proposed FTFDNet is able to achieve a better detection performance than other state-of-the-art DeepFake video detection methods not only on the established fake talking face detection dataset (FTFDD) but also on the DeepFake video detection datasets (DFDC and DF-TIMIT).

cs.CV↗

Quantum Computing Enhanced Distance-Minimizing Data-Driven Computational Mechanics

The distance-minimizing data-driven computational mechanics has great potential in engineering applications by eliminating material modeling error and uncertainty. In this computational framework, the solution-seeking procedure relies on minimizing the distance between the constitutive database and the conservation law. However, the distance calculation is time-consuming and often takes up most of the computational time in the case of a huge database. In this paper, we show how to use quantum computing to enhance data-driven computational mechanics by exponentially reducing the computational complexity of distance calculation. The proposed method is not only validated on the quantum computer simulator Qiskit, but also on the real quantum computer from OriginQ. We believe that this work represents a promising step towards integrating quantum computing into data-driven computational mechanics.

cs.CE↗

Generative Text-Guided 3D Vision-Language Pretraining for Unified Medical Image Segmentation

Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in learning visual representations from textual descriptions of images without annotations. Yet, effective VLP demands large-scale image-text pairs, a resource that suffers scarcity in the medical domain. Moreover, conventional VLP is limited to 2D images while medical images encompass diverse modalities, often in 3D, making the learning process more challenging. To address these challenges, we present Generative Text-Guided 3D Vision-Language Pretraining for Unified Medical Image Segmentation (GTGM), a framework that extends of VLP to 3D medical images without relying on paired textual descriptions. Specifically, GTGM utilizes large language models (LLM) to generate medical-style text from 3D medical images. This synthetic text is then used to supervise 3D visual representation learning. Furthermore, a negative-free contrastive learning objective strategy is introduced to cultivate consistent visual representations between augmented 3D medical image patches, which effectively mitigates the biases associated with strict positive-negative sample pairings. We evaluate GTGM on three imaging modalities - Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and electron microscopy (EM) over 13 datasets. GTGM's superior performance across various medical image segmentation tasks underscores its effectiveness and versatility, by enabling VLP extension into 3D medical imagery while bypassing the need for paired text.

cs.CV↗

Variance reduced Shapley value estimation for trustworthy data valuation

Data valuation, especially quantifying data value in algorithmic prediction and decision-making, is a fundamental problem in data trading scenarios. The most widely used method is to define the data Shapley and approximate it by means of the permutation sampling algorithm. To make up for the large estimation variance of the permutation sampling that hinders the development of the data marketplace, we propose a more robust data valuation method using stratified sampling, named variance reduced data Shapley (VRDS for short). We theoretically show how to stratify, how many samples are taken at each stratum, and the sample complexity analysis of VRDS. Finally, the effectiveness of VRDS is illustrated in different types of datasets and data removal applications.

stat.ML↗

Connection Sensitivity Matters for Training-free DARTS: From Architecture-Level Scoring to Operation-Level Sensitivity Analysis

The recently proposed training-free NAS methods abandon the training phase and design various zero-cost proxies as scores to identify excellent architectures, arousing extreme computational efficiency for neural architecture search. In this paper, we raise an interesting problem: can we properly measure the operation importance in DARTS through a training-free way, with avoiding the parameter-intensive bias? We investigate this question through the lens of edge connectivity, and provide an affirmative answer by defining a connectivity concept, ZERo-cost Operation Sensitivity (ZEROS), to score the importance of candidate operations in DARTS at initialization. By devising an iterative and data-agnostic manner in utilizing ZEROS for NAS, our novel trial leads to a framework called training free differentiable architecture search (FreeDARTS). Based on the theory of Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK), we show the proposed connectivity score provably negatively correlated with the generalization bound of DARTS supernet after convergence under gradient descent training. In addition, we theoretically explain how ZEROS implicitly avoids parameter-intensive bias in selecting architectures, and empirically show the searched architectures by FreeDARTS are of comparable size. Extensive experiments have been conducted on a series of search spaces, and results have demonstrated that FreeDARTS is a reliable and efficient baseline for neural architecture search.

cs.LG↗

A data-driven rutting depth short-time prediction model with metaheuristic optimization for asphalt pavements based on RIOHTrack

Rutting of asphalt pavements is a crucial design criterion in various pavement design guides. A good road transportation base can provide security for the transportation of oil and gas in road transportation. This study attempts to develop a robust artificial intelligence model to estimate different asphalt pavements' rutting depth clips, temperature, and load axes as primary characteristics. The experiment data were obtained from 19 asphalt pavements with different crude oil sources on a 2.038 km long full-scale field accelerated pavement test track (RIOHTrack, Road Track Institute) in Tongzhou, Beijing. In addition, this paper also proposes to build complex networks with different pavement rutting depths through complex network methods and the Louvain algorithm for community detection. The most critical structural elements can be selected from different asphalt pavement rutting data, and similar structural elements can be found. An extreme learning machine algorithm with residual correction (RELM) is designed and optimized using an independent adaptive particle swarm algorithm. The experimental results of the proposed method are compared with several classical machine learning algorithms, with predictions of Average Root Mean Squared Error, Average Mean Absolute Error, and Average Mean Absolute Percentage Error for 19 asphalt pavements reaching 1.742, 1.363, and 1.94\% respectively. The experiments demonstrate that the RELM algorithm has an advantage over classical machine learning methods in dealing with non-linear problems in road engineering. Notably, the method ensures the adaptation of the simulated environment to different levels of abstraction through the cognitive analysis of the production environment parameters.

cs.AI↗

Large Language Models as Master Key: Unlocking the Secrets of Materials Science with GPT

The amount of data has growing significance in exploring cutting-edge materials and a number of datasets have been generated either by hand or automated approaches. However, the materials science field struggles to effectively utilize the abundance of data, especially in applied disciplines where materials are evaluated based on device performance rather than their properties. This article presents a new natural language processing (NLP) task called structured information inference (SII) to address the complexities of information extraction at the device level in materials science. We accomplished this task by tuning GPT-3 on an existing perovskite solar cell FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) dataset with 91.8% F1-score and extended the dataset with data published since its release. The produced data is formatted and normalized, enabling its direct utilization as input in subsequent data analysis. This feature empowers materials scientists to develop models by selecting high-quality review articles within their domain. Additionally, we designed experiments to predict the electrical performance of solar cells and design materials or devices with targeted parameters using large language models (LLMs). Our results demonstrate comparable performance to traditional machine learning methods without feature selection, highlighting the potential of LLMs to acquire scientific knowledge and design new materials akin to materials scientists.

cs.CL↗

Simple and Fast Polarization Tracking algorithm for Continuous-Variable Quantum Key Distribution System Using Orthogonal Pilot Tone

To reduce the influence of random channel polarization variation, especially fast polarization perturbation,for continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) systems, a simple and fast polarization tracking algorithm is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The algorithm is implemented by an orthogonal pilot tone scheme, one of the pilot tones is used for estimating the polarization rotation angle, and the other one is used for compensating the polarization perturbation introduced phase noise. Meanwhile, residual effects are compensated precisely with the help of a real-valued FIR filter. In this case, the excess noise introduced by polarization perturbation is effectively suppressed. Experimental results show that the polarization scrambling rate 12.57 krad/s can be tracked by using the proposed algorithm, and a good estimated parameters performance is achieved. Compared to conventional polarization tracking algorithms such as the constant modulus algorithm (CMA), experimental results show that the polarization tracking apability of the proposed algorithm is significantly improved. Furthermore, much faster polarization tracking performance is evaluated by digital simulations, and the simulation results show that about 188.50 Mrad/s can be tracked by the proposed algorithm. Thus, our method provides effective technology for the practical application of fiber-based CV-QKD.

quant-ph↗

CASP-Net: Rethinking Video Saliency Prediction from an Audio-VisualConsistency Perceptual Perspective

Incorporating the audio stream enables Video Saliency Prediction (VSP) to imitate the selective attention mechanism of human brain. By focusing on the benefits of joint auditory and visual information, most VSP methods are capable of exploiting semantic correlation between vision and audio modalities but ignoring the negative effects due to the temporal inconsistency of audio-visual intrinsics. Inspired by the biological inconsistency-correction within multi-sensory information, in this study, a consistency-aware audio-visual saliency prediction network (CASP-Net) is proposed, which takes a comprehensive consideration of the audio-visual semantic interaction and consistent perception. In addition a two-stream encoder for elegant association between video frames and corresponding sound source, a novel consistency-aware predictive coding is also designed to improve the consistency within audio and visual representations iteratively. To further aggregate the multi-scale audio-visual information, a saliency decoder is introduced for the final saliency map generation. Substantial experiments demonstrate that the proposed CASP-Net outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods on six challenging audio-visual eye-tracking datasets. For a demo of our system please see our project webpage.

cs.CV↗

Practical Continuous-variable Quantum Key Distribution with Feasible Optimization Parameters

Continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) offers an approach to achieve a potential high secret key rate (SKR) in metropolitan areas. There are several challenges in developing a practical CV-QKD system from the laboratory to the real world. One of the most significant points is that it is really hard to adapt different practical optical fiber conditions for CV-QKD systems with unified hardware. Thus, how to improve the performance of practical CV-QKD systems in the field without modification of the hardware is very important. Here, a systematic optimization method, combining the modulation variance and error correction matrix optimization, is proposed to improve the performance of a practical CV-QKD system with a restricted capacity of postprocessing. The effect of restricted postprocessing capacity on the SKR is modeled as a nonlinear programming problem with modulation variance as an optimization parameter, and the selection of an optimal error correction matrix is studied under the same scheme. The results show that the SKR of a CV-QKD system can be improved by 24% and 200% compared with previous frequently used optimization methods theoretically with a transmission distance of 50 km. Furthermore, the experimental results verify the feasibility and robustness of the proposed method, where the achieved optimal SKR achieved practically deviates <1.6% from the theoretical optimal value. Our results pave the way to deploy high-performance CV-QKD in the real world.

quant-ph↗

Generic-to-Specific Distillation of Masked Autoencoders

Large vision Transformers (ViTs) driven by self-supervised pre-training mechanisms achieved unprecedented progress. Lightweight ViT models limited by the model capacity, however, benefit little from those pre-training mechanisms. Knowledge distillation defines a paradigm to transfer representations from large (teacher) models to small (student) ones. However, the conventional single-stage distillation easily gets stuck on task-specific transfer, failing to retain the task-agnostic knowledge crucial for model generalization. In this study, we propose generic-to-specific distillation (G2SD), to tap the potential of small ViT models under the supervision of large models pre-trained by masked autoencoders. In generic distillation, decoder of the small model is encouraged to align feature predictions with hidden representations of the large model, so that task-agnostic knowledge can be transferred. In specific distillation, predictions of the small model are constrained to be consistent with those of the large model, to transfer task-specific features which guarantee task performance. With G2SD, the vanilla ViT-Small model respectively achieves 98.7%, 98.1% and 99.3% the performance of its teacher (ViT-Base) for image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, setting a solid baseline for two-stage vision distillation. Code will be available at https://github.com/pengzhiliang/G2SD.

cs.CV↗

DMMG: Dual Min-Max Games for Self-Supervised Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

In this work, we propose a new Dual Min-Max Games (DMMG) based self-supervised skeleton action recognition method by augmenting unlabeled data in a contrastive learning framework. Our DMMG consists of a viewpoint variation min-max game and an edge perturbation min-max game. These two min-max games adopt an adversarial paradigm to perform data augmentation on the skeleton sequences and graph-structured body joints, respectively. Our viewpoint variation min-max game focuses on constructing various hard contrastive pairs by generating skeleton sequences from various viewpoints. These hard contrastive pairs help our model learn representative action features, thus facilitating model transfer to downstream tasks. Moreover, our edge perturbation min-max game specializes in building diverse hard contrastive samples through perturbing connectivity strength among graph-based body joints. The connectivity-strength varying contrastive pairs enable the model to capture minimal sufficient information of different actions, such as representative gestures for an action while preventing the model from overfitting. By fully exploiting the proposed DMMG, we can generate sufficient challenging contrastive pairs and thus achieve discriminative action feature representations from unlabeled skeleton data in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior results under various evaluation protocols on widely-used NTU-RGB+D and NTU120-RGB+D datasets.

cs.CV↗

Oxidized organic molecules in the tropical free troposphere over Amazonia

New particle formation (NPF) in the tropical free troposphere (FT) is a globally important source of cloud condensation nuclei, affecting cloud properties and climate. Oxidized organic molecules (OOMs) produced from biogenic volatile organic compounds are believed to contribute to aerosol formation in the tropical FT, but without direct chemical observations. We performed in-situ molecular-level OOMs measurements at the Bolivian station Chacaltaya at 5240 meters above sea level, on the western edge of Amazonia. For the first time, we demonstrate the presence of OOMs, mainly with 4-5 carbon atoms, simultaneously in both gas and particulate phases in tropical FT air from Amazonia. These observations, combined with air mass history analyses, indicate that the observed OOMs are linked to isoprene emitted from the rainforests hundreds of kilometers away. Based on particle-phase measurements, we find that these compounds can contribute to the growth of newly formed particles, and are potentially crucial for new particle formation in the tropical free troposphere on a continental scale. Our study will thus improve the understanding of aerosol formation process in the tropics.

physics.ao-ph↗

On the Sparse DAG Structure Learning Based on Adaptive Lasso

Learning the underlying Bayesian Networks (BNs), represented by directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), of the concerned events from purely-observational data is a crucial part of evidential reasoning. This task remains challenging due to the large and discrete search space. A recent flurry of developments followed NOTEARS[1] recast this combinatorial problem into a continuous optimization problem by leveraging an algebraic equality characterization of acyclicity. However, the continuous optimization methods suffer from obtaining non-spare graphs after the numerical optimization, which leads to the inflexibility to rule out the potentially cycle-inducing edges or false discovery edges with small values. To address this issue, in this paper, we develop a completely data-driven DAG structure learning method without a predefined value to post-threshold small values. We name our method NOTEARS with adaptive Lasso (NOTEARS-AL), which is achieved by applying the adaptive penalty method to ensure the sparsity of the estimated DAG. Moreover, we show that NOTEARS-AL also inherits the oracle properties under some specific conditions. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and a real-world dataset demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms NOTEARS.

stat.ML↗

Communication under Mixed Gaussian-Impulsive Channel: An End-to-End Framework

In many communication scenarios, the communication signals simultaneously suffer from white Gaussian noise (WGN) and non-Gaussian impulsive noise (IN), i.e., mixed Gaussian-impulsive noise (MGIN). Under MGIN channel, classical communication signal schemes and corresponding detection methods usually can not achieve desirable performance as they are optimized with respect to WGN. Moreover, as the widely adopted IN model has no analytical and general closed-form expression of probability density function (PDF), it is extremely hard to obtain optimal communication signal and corresponding detection schemes based on classical stochastic signal processing theory. To circumvent these difficulties, we propose a data-driven end-to-end framework to address the communication signal design and detection under MGIN channel in this paper. In this proposed framework, a channel noise simulator (CNS) is elaborately designed based on an improved generative adversarial net (GAN) to simulate the MGIN without requirement of any analytical PDF. Meanwhile, a multi-level wavelet convolutional neural network (MWCNN) based preprocessing network is used to mitigate the negative effect of outliers due to the IN. Compared with conventional approaches and existing end-to-end systems, extensive simulation results verify that our proposed novel end-to-end communication system can achieve better performance in terms of bit-error rate (BER) under MGIN environments.

eess.SP↗

MissDAG: Causal Discovery in the Presence of Missing Data with Continuous Additive Noise Models

State-of-the-art causal discovery methods usually assume that the observational data is complete. However, the missing data problem is pervasive in many practical scenarios such as clinical trials, economics, and biology. One straightforward way to address the missing data problem is first to impute the data using off-the-shelf imputation methods and then apply existing causal discovery methods. However, such a two-step method may suffer from suboptimality, as the imputation algorithm may introduce bias for modeling the underlying data distribution. In this paper, we develop a general method, which we call MissDAG, to perform causal discovery from data with incomplete observations. Focusing mainly on the assumptions of ignorable missingness and the identifiable additive noise models (ANMs), MissDAG maximizes the expected likelihood of the visible part of observations under the expectation-maximization (EM) framework. In the E-step, in cases where computing the posterior distributions of parameters in closed-form is not feasible, Monte Carlo EM is leveraged to approximate the likelihood. In the M-step, MissDAG leverages the density transformation to model the noise distributions with simpler and specific formulations by virtue of the ANMs and uses a likelihood-based causal discovery algorithm with directed acyclic graph constraint. We demonstrate the flexibility of MissDAG for incorporating various causal discovery algorithms and its efficacy through extensive simulations and real data experiments.

cs.LG↗