Lifting
The great advances of learning-based approaches in image processing and computer vision are largely based on deeply nested networks that compose linear transfer functions with suitable non-linearities. Interestingly, the most frequently used non-linearities in imaging applications (variants of the rectified linear unit) are uncommon in low dimensional approximation problems. In this paper we propose a novel non-linear transfer function, called lifting, which is motivated from a related technique in convex optimization. A lifting layer increases the dimensionality of the input, naturally yields a linear spline when combined with a fully connected layer, and therefore closes the gap between low and high dimensional approximation problems. Moreover, applying the lifting operation to the loss layer of the network allows us to handle non-convex and flat (zero-gradient) cost functions. We analyze the proposed lifting theoretically, exemplify interesting properties in synthetic experiments and demonstrate its effectiveness in deep learning approaches to image classification and denoising. …

Hu-Fu
Recently, Deep Learning (DL), especially Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), develops rapidly and is applied to many tasks, such as image classification, face recognition, image segmentation, and human detection. Due to its superior performance, DL-based models have a wide range of application in many areas, some of which are extremely safety-critical, e.g. intelligent surveillance and autonomous driving. Due to the latency and privacy problem of cloud computing, embedded accelerators are popular in these safety-critical areas. However, the robustness of the embedded DL system might be harmed by inserting hardware/software Trojans into the accelerator and the neural network model, since the accelerator and deploy tool (or neural network model) are usually provided by third-party companies. Fortunately, inserting hardware Trojans can only achieve inflexible attack, which means that hardware Trojans can easily break down the whole system or exchange two outputs, but can’t make CNN recognize unknown pictures as targets. Though inserting software Trojans has more freedom of attack, it often requires tampering input images, which is not easy for attackers. So, in this paper, we propose a hardware-software collaborative attack framework to inject hidden neural network Trojans, which works as a back-door without requiring manipulating input images and is flexible for different scenarios. We test our attack framework for image classification and face recognition tasks, and get attack success rate of 92.6% and 100% on CIFAR10 and YouTube Faces, respectively, while keeping almost the same accuracy as the unattacked model in the normal mode. In addition, we show a specific attack scenario in which a face recognition system is attacked and gives a specific wrong answer. …

ImageNet-C
In this paper we establish rigorous benchmarks for image classifier robustness. Our first benchmark, ImageNet-C, standardizes and expands the corruption robustness topic, while showing which classifiers are preferable in safety-critical applications. Then we propose a new dataset called ImageNet-P which enables researchers to benchmark a classifier’s robustness to common perturbations. Unlike recent robustness research, this benchmark evaluates performance on common corruptions and perturbations not worst-case adversarial perturbations. We find that there are negligible changes in relative corruption robustness from AlexNet classifiers to ResNet classifiers. Afterward we discover ways to enhance corruption and perturbation robustness. We even find that a bypassed adversarial defense provides substantial common perturbation robustness. Together our benchmarks may aid future work toward networks that robustly generalize. …

Labeled Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LLDA)
Labeled Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LLDA) is an extension of the standard unsupervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm, to address multi-label learning tasks. Previous work has shown it to perform in par with other state-of-the-art multi-label methods. Nonetheless, with increasing label sets sizes LLDA encounters scalability issues. In this work, we introduce Subset LLDA, a simple variant of the standard LLDA algorithm, that not only can effectively scale up to problems with hundreds of thousands of labels but also improves over the LLDA state-of-the-art. We conduct extensive experiments on eight data sets, with label sets sizes ranging from hundreds to hundreds of thousands, comparing our proposed algorithm with the previously proposed LLDA algorithms (Prior–LDA, Dep–LDA), as well as the state of the art in extreme multi-label classification. The results show a steady advantage of our method over the other LLDA algorithms and competitive results compared to the extreme multi-label classification algorithms. …