Evaluation of a "Black-Box" State-of-the-Art Vision-Based Navigation Algorithm for GPS-Denied Navigation

Author(s):  
Simone B. Bortolami ◽  
Helen Webb ◽  
Michael Richman ◽  
Peter Norton
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (8) ◽  
pp. 898-911
Author(s):  
Yongqing Zhang ◽  
Jianrong Yan ◽  
Siyu Chen ◽  
Meiqin Gong ◽  
Dongrui Gao ◽  
...  

Rapid advances in biological research over recent years have significantly enriched biological and medical data resources. Deep learning-based techniques have been successfully utilized to process data in this field, and they have exhibited state-of-the-art performances even on high-dimensional, nonstructural, and black-box biological data. The aim of the current study is to provide an overview of the deep learning-based techniques used in biology and medicine and their state-of-the-art applications. In particular, we introduce the fundamentals of deep learning and then review the success of applying such methods to bioinformatics, biomedical imaging, biomedicine, and drug discovery. We also discuss the challenges and limitations of this field, and outline possible directions for further research.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-228
Author(s):  
Yuantian Miao ◽  
Minhui Xue ◽  
Chao Chen ◽  
Lei Pan ◽  
Jun Zhang ◽  
...  

AbstractWith the rapid development of deep learning techniques, the popularity of voice services implemented on various Internet of Things (IoT) devices is ever increasing. In this paper, we examine user-level membership inference in the problem space of voice services, by designing an audio auditor to verify whether a specific user had unwillingly contributed audio used to train an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model under strict black-box access. With user representation of the input audio data and their corresponding translated text, our trained auditor is effective in user-level audit. We also observe that the auditor trained on specific data can be generalized well regardless of the ASR model architecture. We validate the auditor on ASR models trained with LSTM, RNNs, and GRU algorithms on two state-of-the-art pipelines, the hybrid ASR system and the end-to-end ASR system. Finally, we conduct a real-world trial of our auditor on iPhone Siri, achieving an overall accuracy exceeding 80%. We hope the methodology developed in this paper and findings can inform privacy advocates to overhaul IoT privacy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-404
Author(s):  
Mario A. Muñoz ◽  
Kate Smith-Miles

This article presents a method to generate diverse and challenging new test instances for continuous black-box optimization. Each instance is represented as a feature vector of exploratory landscape analysis measures. By projecting the features into a two-dimensional instance space, the location of existing test instances can be visualized, and their similarities and differences revealed. New instances are generated through genetic programming which evolves functions with controllable characteristics. Convergence to selected target points in the instance space is used to drive the evolutionary process, such that the new instances span the entire space more comprehensively. We demonstrate the method by generating two-dimensional functions to visualize its success, and ten-dimensional functions to test its scalability. We show that the method can recreate existing test functions when target points are co-located with existing functions, and can generate new functions with entirely different characteristics when target points are located in empty regions of the instance space. Moreover, we test the effectiveness of three state-of-the-art algorithms on the new set of instances. The results demonstrate that the new set is not only more diverse than a well-known benchmark set, but also more challenging for the tested algorithms. Hence, the method opens up a new avenue for developing test instances with controllable characteristics, necessary to expose the strengths and weaknesses of algorithms, and drive algorithm development.


2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (15) ◽  
pp. 4118-4154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Stöhr ◽  
Troy Van Voorhis ◽  
Alexandre Tkatchenko

Opening the black box of van der Waals-inclusive electronic structure calculations: a tutorial-style introduction to van der Waals dispersion interactions, state-of-the-art methods in computational modeling and complementary experimental techniques.


Author(s):  
Chaowei Xiao ◽  
Bo Li ◽  
Jun-yan Zhu ◽  
Warren He ◽  
Mingyan Liu ◽  
...  

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples resulting from adding small-magnitude perturbations to inputs. Such adversarial examples can mislead DNNs to produce adversary-selected results. Different attack strategies have been proposed to generate adversarial examples, but how to produce them with high perceptual quality and more efficiently requires more research efforts. In this paper, we propose AdvGAN to generate adversarial exam- ples with generative adversarial networks (GANs), which can learn and approximate the distribution of original instances. For AdvGAN, once the generator is trained, it can generate perturbations efficiently for any instance, so as to potentially accelerate adversarial training as defenses. We apply Adv- GAN in both semi-whitebox and black-box attack settings. In semi-whitebox attacks, there is no need to access the original target model after the generator is trained, in contrast to traditional white-box attacks. In black-box attacks, we dynamically train a distilled model for the black-box model and optimize the generator accordingly. Adversarial examples generated by AdvGAN on different target models have high attack success rate under state-of-the-art defenses compared to other attacks. Our attack has placed the first with 92.76% accuracy on a public MNIST black-box attack challenge.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 966-989
Author(s):  
Vanessa Buhrmester ◽  
David Münch ◽  
Michael Arens

Deep Learning is a state-of-the-art technique to make inference on extensive or complex data. As a black box model due to their multilayer nonlinear structure, Deep Neural Networks are often criticized as being non-transparent and their predictions not traceable by humans. Furthermore, the models learn from artificially generated datasets, which often do not reflect reality. By basing decision-making algorithms on Deep Neural Networks, prejudice and unfairness may be promoted unknowingly due to a lack of transparency. Hence, several so-called explanators, or explainers, have been developed. Explainers try to give insight into the inner structure of machine learning black boxes by analyzing the connection between the input and output. In this survey, we present the mechanisms and properties of explaining systems for Deep Neural Networks for Computer Vision tasks. We give a comprehensive overview about the taxonomy of related studies and compare several survey papers that deal with explainability in general. We work out the drawbacks and gaps and summarize further research ideas.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Benjamin Evans

<p>Ensemble learning is one of the most powerful extensions for improving upon individual machine learning models. Rather than a single model being used, several models are trained and the predictions combined to make a more informed decision. Such combinations will ideally overcome the shortcomings of any individual member of the ensemble. Most ma- chine learning competition winners feature an ensemble of some sort, and there is also sound theoretical proof to the performance of certain ensem- bling schemes. The benefits of ensembling are clear in both theory and practice.  Despite the great performance, ensemble learning is not a trivial task. One of the main difficulties is designing appropriate ensembles. For exam- ple, how large should an ensemble be? What members should be included in an ensemble? How should these members be weighted? Our first contribution addresses these concerns using a strongly-typed population- based search (genetic programming) to construct well-performing ensem- bles, where the entire ensemble (members, hyperparameters, structure) is automatically learnt. The proposed method was found, in general, to be significantly better than all base members and commonly used compari- son methods trialled.  With automatically designed ensembles, there is a range of applica- tions, such as competition entries, forecasting and state-of-the-art predic- tions. However, often these applications also require additional prepro- cessing of the input data. Above the ensemble considers only the original training data, however, in many machine learning scenarios a pipeline is required (for example performing feature selection before classification). For the second contribution, a novel automated machine learning method is proposed based on ensemble learning. This method uses a random population-based search of appropriate tree structures, and as such is em- barrassingly parallel, an important consideration for automated machine learning. The proposed method is able to achieve equivalent or improved results over the current state-of-the-art methods and does so in a fraction of the time (six times as fast).  Finally, while complex ensembles offer great performance, one large limitation is the interpretability of such ensembles. For example, why does a forest of 500 trees predict a particular class for a given instance? In an effort to explain the behaviour of complex models (such as ensem- bles), several methods have been proposed. However, these approaches tend to suffer at least one of the following limitations: overly complex in the representation, local in their application, limited to particular fea- ture types (i.e. categorical only), or limited to particular algorithms. For our third contribution, a novel model agnostic method for interpreting complex black-box machine learning models is proposed. The method is based on strongly-typed genetic programming and overcomes the afore- mentioned limitations. Multi-objective optimisation is used to generate a Pareto frontier of simple and explainable models which approximate the behaviour of much more complex methods. We found the resulting rep- resentations are far simpler than existing approaches (an important con- sideration for interpretability) while providing equivalent reconstruction performance.  Overall, this thesis addresses two of the major limitations of existing ensemble learning, i.e. the complex construction process and the black- box models that are often difficult to interpret. A novel application of ensemble learning in the field of automated machine learning is also pro- posed. All three methods have shown at least equivalent or improved performance than existing methods.</p>


Author(s):  
Thibault Laugel ◽  
Marie-Jeanne Lesot ◽  
Christophe Marsala ◽  
Xavier Renard ◽  
Marcin Detyniecki

Post-hoc interpretability approaches have been proven to be powerful tools to generate explanations for the predictions made by a trained black-box model. However, they create the risk of having explanations that are a result of some artifacts learned by the model instead of actual knowledge from the data. This paper focuses on the case of counterfactual explanations and asks whether the generated instances can be justified, i.e. continuously connected to some ground-truth data. We evaluate the risk of generating unjustified counterfactual examples by investigating the local neighborhoods of instances whose predictions are to be explained and show that this risk is quite high for several datasets. Furthermore, we show that most state of the art approaches do not differentiate justified from unjustified counterfactual examples, leading to less useful explanations.


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