The success of deep learning in the past decade is partially shrouded in the shadow of adversarial attacks. In contrast, the brain is far more robust at complex cognitive tasks. Utilizing the advantage that neurons in the brain communicate via spikes, spiking neural networks (SNNs) are emerging as a new type of neural network model, boosting the frontier of theoretical investigation and empirical application of artificial neural networks and deep learning. Neuroscience research proposes that the precise timing of neural spikes plays an important role in the information coding and sensory processing of the biological brain. However, the role of spike timing in SNNs is less considered and far from understood. Here we systematically explored the timing mechanism of spike coding in SNNs, focusing on the robustness of the system against various types of attacks. We found that SNNs can achieve higher robustness improvement using the coding principle of precise spike timing in neural encoding and decoding, facilitated by different learning rules. Our results suggest that the utility of spike timing coding in SNNs could improve the robustness against attacks, providing a new approach to reliable coding principles for developing next-generation brain-inspired deep learning.
Advances in deep learning have greatly improved structure prediction of molecules. However, many macroscopic observations that are important for real-world applications are not functions of a single molecular structure, but rather determined from the equilibrium distribution of structures. Traditional methods for obtaining these distributions, such as molecular dynamics simulation, are computationally expensive and often intractable. In this paper, we introduce a novel deep learning framework, called Distributional Graphormer (DiG), in an attempt to predict the equilibrium distribution of molecular systems. Inspired by the annealing process in thermodynamics, DiG employs deep neural networks to transform a simple distribution towards the equilibrium distribution, conditioned on a descriptor of a molecular system, such as a chemical graph or a protein sequence. This framework enables efficient generation of diverse conformations and provides estimations of state densities. We demonstrate the performance of DiG on several molecular tasks, including protein conformation sampling, ligand structure sampling, catalyst-adsorbate sampling, and property-guided structure generation. DiG presents a significant advancement in methodology for statistically understanding molecular systems, opening up new research opportunities in molecular science.
Modulation classification is an essential step of signal processing and has been regularly applied in the field of tele-communication. Since variations of frequency with respect to time remains a vital distinction among radio signals having different modulation formats, these variations can be used for feature extraction by converting 1-D radio signals into frequency domain. In this paper, we propose a scheme for Automatic Modulation Classification (AMC) using modern architectures of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), through generating spectrum images of eleven different modulation types. Additionally, we perform resolution transformation of spectrograms that results up to 99.61% of computational load reduction and 8x faster conversion from the received I/Q data. This proposed AMC is implemented on CPU and GPU, to recognize digital as well as analogue signal modulation schemes on signals. The performance is evaluated on existing CNN models including SqueezeNet, Resnet-50, InceptionResnet-V2, Inception-V3, VGG-16 and Densenet-201. Best results of 91.2% are achieved in presence of AWGN and other noise impairments in the signals, stating that the transformed spectrogram-based AMC has good classification accuracy as the spectral features are highly discriminant, and CNN based models have capability to extract these high-dimensional features. The spectrograms were created under different SNRs ranging from 5 to 30db with a step size of 5db to observe the experimental results at various SNR levels. The proposed methodology is efficient to be applied in wireless communication networks for real-time applications.
In this paper, we address the problem of Received Signal Strength map reconstruction based on location-dependent radio measurements and utilizing side knowledge about the local region; for example, city plan, terrain height, gateway position. Depending on the quantity of such prior side information, we employ Neural Architecture Search to find an optimized Neural Network model with the best architecture for each of the supposed settings. We demonstrate that using additional side information enhances the final accuracy of the Received Signal Strength map reconstruction on three datasets that correspond to three major cities, particularly in sub-areas near the gateways where larger variations of the average received signal power are typically observed.
Demand-side management now encompasses more residential loads. To efficiently apply demand response strategies, it's essential to periodically observe the contribution of various domestic appliances to total energy consumption. Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), also known as load disaggregation, is a method for decomposing the total energy consumption profile into individual appliance load profiles within the household. It has multiple applications in demand-side management, energy consumption monitoring, and analysis. Various methods, including machine learning and deep learning, have been used to implement and improve NILM algorithms. This paper reviews some recent NILM methods based on deep learning and introduces the most accurate methods for residential loads. It summarizes public databases for NILM evaluation and compares methods using standard performance metrics.
We survey eight recent works by our group, involving the successful blending of evolutionary algorithms with machine learning and deep learning: 1. Binary and Multinomial Classification through Evolutionary Symbolic Regression, 2. Classy Ensemble: A Novel Ensemble Algorithm for Classification, 3. EC-KitY: Evolutionary Computation Tool Kit in Python, 4. Evolution of Activation Functions for Deep Learning-Based Image Classification, 5. Adaptive Combination of a Genetic Algorithm and Novelty Search for Deep Neuroevolution, 6. An Evolutionary, Gradient-Free, Query-Efficient, Black-Box Algorithm for Generating Adversarial Instances in Deep Networks, 7. Foiling Explanations in Deep Neural Networks, 8. Patch of Invisibility: Naturalistic Black-Box Adversarial Attacks on Object Detectors.
Signal processing traditionally relies on classical statistical modeling techniques. Such model-based methods utilize mathematical formulations that represent the underlying physics, prior information and additional domain knowledge. Simple classical models are useful but sensitive to inaccuracies and may lead to poor performance when real systems display complex or dynamic behavior. More recently, deep learning approaches that use deep neural networks are becoming increasingly popular. Deep learning systems do not rely on mathematical modeling, and learn their mapping from data, which allows them to operate in complex environments. However, they lack the interpretability and reliability of model-based methods, typically require large training sets to obtain good performance, and tend to be computationally complex. Model-based signal processing methods and data-centric deep learning each have their pros and cons. These paradigms can be characterized as edges of a continuous spectrum varying in specificity and parameterization. The methodologies that lie in the middle ground of this spectrum, thus integrating model-based signal processing with deep learning, are referred to as model-based deep learning, and are the focus here. This monograph provides a tutorial style presentation of model-based deep learning methodologies. These are families of algorithms that combine principled mathematical models with data-driven systems to benefit from the advantages of both approaches. Such model-based deep learning methods exploit both partial domain knowledge, via mathematical structures designed for specific problems, as well as learning from limited data. We accompany our presentation with running examples, in super-resolution, dynamic systems, and array processing. We show how they are expressed using the provided characterization and specialized in each of the detailed methodologies.
Parking guidance systems have recently become a popular trend as a part of the smart cities' paradigm of development. The crucial part of such systems is the algorithm allowing drivers to search for available parking lots across regions of interest. The classic approach to this task is based on the application of neural network classifiers to camera records. However, existing systems demonstrate a lack of generalization ability and appropriate testing regarding specific visual conditions. In this study, we extensively evaluate state-of-the-art parking lot occupancy detection algorithms, compare their prediction quality with the recently emerged vision transformers, and propose a new pipeline based on EfficientNet architecture. Performed computational experiments have demonstrated the performance increase in the case of our model, which was evaluated on 5 different datasets.
Accurate indoor positioning for wireless communication systems represents an important step towards enhanced reliability and security, which are crucial aspects for realizing Industry 4.0. In this context, this paper presents an investigation on the real-world indoor positioning performance that can be obtained using a deep learning (DL)-based technique. For obtaining experimental data, we collect power measurements associated with reference positions using a wireless sensor network in an indoor scenario. The DL-based positioning scheme is modeled as a supervised learning problem, where the function that describes the relation between measured signal power values and their corresponding transmitter coordinates is approximated. We compare the DL approach to two different schemes with varying degrees of online computational complexity. Namely, maximum likelihood estimation and proximity. Furthermore, we provide a performance comparison of DL positioning trained with data generated exclusively based on a statistical path loss model and tested with experimental data.
This work presents an investigation on the scalability of a deep leaning (DL)-based blind transmitter positioning system for addressing the multi transmitter localization (MLT) problem. The proposed approach is able to estimate relative coordinates of non-cooperative active transmitters based solely on received signal strength measurements collected by a wireless sensor network. A performance comparison with two other solutions of the MLT problem are presented for demonstrating the benefits with respect to scalability of the DL approach. Our investigation aims at highlighting the potential of DL to be a key technique that is able to provide a low complexity, accurate and reliable transmitter positioning service for improving future wireless communications systems.
Despite significant advances in the field of deep learning in ap-plications to various areas, an explanation of the learning pro-cess of neural network models remains an important open ques-tion. The purpose of this paper is a comprehensive comparison and description of neural network architectures in terms of ge-ometry and topology. We focus on the internal representation of neural networks and on the dynamics of changes in the topology and geometry of a data manifold on different layers. In this paper, we use the concepts of topological data analysis (TDA) and persistent homological fractal dimension. We present a wide range of experiments with various datasets and configurations of convolutional neural network (CNNs) architectures and Transformers in CV and NLP tasks. Our work is a contribution to the development of the important field of explainable and interpretable AI within the framework of geometrical deep learning.
Light microscopy is a widespread and inexpensive imaging technique facilitating biomedical discovery and diagnostics. However, light diffraction barrier and imperfections in optics limit the level of detail of the acquired images. The details lost can be reconstructed among others by deep learning models. Yet, deep learning models are prone to introduce artefacts and hallucinations into the reconstruction. Recent state-of-the-art image synthesis models like the denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) are no exception to this. We propose to address this by incorporating the physical problem of microscopy image formation into the model's loss function. To overcome the lack of microscopy data, we train this model with synthetic data. We simulate the effects of the microscope optics through the theoretical point spread function and varying the noise levels to obtain synthetic data. Furthermore, we incorporate the physical model of a light microscope into the reverse process of a conditioned DDPM proposing a physics-informed DDPM (PI-DDPM). We show consistent improvement and artefact reductions when compared to model-based methods, deep-learning regression methods and regular conditioned DDPMs.
Direction of arrival (DoA) estimation is a fundamental task in array processing. A popular family of DoA estimation algorithms are subspace methods, which operate by dividing the measurements into distinct signal and noise subspaces. Subspace methods, such as Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) and Root-MUSIC, rely on several restrictive assumptions, including narrowband non-coherent sources and fully calibrated arrays, and their performance is considerably degraded when these do not hold. In this work we propose SubspaceNet; a data-driven DoA estimator which learns how to divide the observations into distinguishable subspaces. This is achieved by utilizing a dedicated deep neural network to learn the empirical autocorrelation of the input, by training it as part of the Root-MUSIC method, leveraging the inherent differentiability of this specific DoA estimator, while removing the need to provide a ground-truth decomposable autocorrelation matrix. Once trained, the resulting SubspaceNet serves as a universal surrogate covariance estimator that can be applied in combination with any subspace-based DoA estimation method, allowing its successful application in challenging setups. SubspaceNet is shown to enable various DoA estimation algorithms to cope with coherent sources, wideband signals, low SNR, array mismatches, and limited snapshots, while preserving the interpretability and the suitability of classic subspace methods.
Data-driven companies use AI models extensively to develop products and intelligent business solutions, making the health of these models crucial for business success. Model monitoring and alerting in industries pose unique challenges, including a lack of clear model health metrics definition, label sparsity, and fast model iterations that result in short-lived models and features. As a product, there are also requirements for scalability, generalizability, and explainability. To tackle these challenges, we propose AlerTiger, a deep-learning-based MLOps model monitoring system that helps AI teams across the company monitor their AI models' health by detecting anomalies in models' input features and output score over time. The system consists of four major steps: model statistics generation, deep-learning-based anomaly detection, anomaly post-processing, and user alerting. Our solution generates three categories of statistics to indicate AI model health, offers a two-stage deep anomaly detection solution to address label sparsity and attain the generalizability of monitoring new models, and provides holistic reports for actionable alerts. This approach has been deployed to most of LinkedIn's production AI models for over a year and has identified several model issues that later led to significant business metric gains after fixing.
Existing methods to recover model accuracy on analog-digital hardware in the presence of quantization and analog noise include noise-injection training. However, it can be slow in practice, incurring high computational costs, even when starting from pretrained models. We introduce the Sensitivity-Aware Finetuning (SAFT) approach that identifies noise sensitive layers in a model, and uses the information to freeze specific layers for noise-injection training. Our results show that SAFT achieves comparable accuracy to noise-injection training and is 2x to 8x faster.
Accurate crude oil price prediction is crucial for financial decision-making. We propose a novel reservoir computing model for forecasting crude oil prices. It outperforms popular deep learning methods in most scenarios, as demonstrated through rigorous evaluation using daily closing price data from major stock market indices. Our model's competitive advantage is further validated by comparing it with recent deep-learning approaches. This study introduces innovative reservoir computing models for predicting crude oil prices, with practical implications for financial practitioners. By leveraging advanced techniques, market participants can enhance decision-making and gain valuable insights into crude oil market dynamics.
The vast increase of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and the ever-evolving attack vectors have increased cyber-security risks dramatically. A common approach to implementing AI-based Intrusion Detection systems (IDSs) in distributed IoT systems is in a centralised manner. However, this approach may violate data privacy and prohibit IDS scalability. Therefore, intrusion detection solutions in IoT ecosystems need to move towards a decentralised direction. Federated Learning (FL) has attracted significant interest in recent years due to its ability to perform collaborative learning while preserving data confidentiality and locality. Nevertheless, most FL-based IDS for IoT systems are designed under unrealistic data distribution conditions. To that end, we design an experiment representative of the real world and evaluate the performance of an FL-based IDS. For our experiments, we rely on TON-IoT, a realistic IoT network traffic dataset, associating each IP address with a single FL client. Additionally, we explore pre-training and investigate various aggregation methods to mitigate the impact of data heterogeneity. Lastly, we benchmark our approach against a centralised solution. The comparison shows that the heterogeneous nature of the data has a considerable negative impact on the model's performance when trained in a distributed manner. However, in the case of a pre-trained initial global FL model, we demonstrate a performance improvement of over 20% (F1-score) compared to a randomly initiated global model.
In visual object classification, humans often justify their choices by comparing objects to prototypical examples within that class. We may therefore increase the interpretability of deep learning models by imbuing them with a similar style of reasoning. In this work, we apply this principle by classifying Alzheimer's Disease based on the similarity of images to training examples within the latent space. We use a contrastive loss combined with a diffusion autoencoder backbone, to produce a semantically meaningful latent space, such that neighbouring latents have similar image-level features. We achieve a classification accuracy comparable to black box approaches on a dataset of 2D MRI images, whilst producing human interpretable model explanations. Therefore, this work stands as a contribution to the pertinent development of accurate and interpretable deep learning within medical imaging.
Visual explanation is an approach for visualizing the grounds of judgment by deep learning, and it is possible to visually interpret the grounds of a judgment for a certain input by visualizing an attention map. As for deep-learning models that output erroneous decision-making grounds, a method that incorporates expert human knowledge in the model via an attention map in a manner that improves explanatory power and recognition accuracy is proposed. In this study, based on a deep-learning model that incorporates the knowledge of experts, a method by which a learner "learns from AI" the grounds for its decisions is proposed. An "attention branch network" (ABN), which has been fine-tuned with attention maps modified by experts, is prepared as a teacher. By using an interactive editing tool for the fine-tuned ABN and attention maps, the learner learns by editing the attention maps and changing the inference results. By repeatedly editing the attention maps and making inferences so that the correct recognition results are output, the learner can acquire the grounds for the expert's judgments embedded in the ABN. The results of an evaluation experiment with subjects show that learning using the proposed method is more efficient than the conventional method.
The increasing installation rate of wind power poses great challenges to the global power system. In order to ensure the reliable operation of the power system, it is necessary to accurately forecast the wind speed and power of the wind turbines. At present, deep learning is progressively applied to the wind speed prediction. Nevertheless, the recent deep learning methods still reflect the embarrassment for practical applications due to model interpretability and hardware limitation. To this end, a novel deep knowledge-based learning method is proposed in this paper. The proposed method hybridizes pre-training method and auto-encoder structure to improve data representation and modeling of the deep knowledge-based learning framework. In order to form knowledge and corresponding absorbers, the original data is preprocessed by an optimization model based on correlation to construct multi-layer networks (knowledge) which are absorbed by sequence to sequence (Seq2Seq) models. Specifically, new cognition and memory units (CMU) are designed to reinforce traditional deep learning framework. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by three wind prediction cases from a wind farm in Liaoning, China. Experimental results show that the proposed method increases the stability and training efficiency compared to the traditional LSTM method and LSTM/GRU-based Seq2Seq method for applications of wind speed forecasting.