Maximal alpha-Leakage
A tunable measure for information leakage called \textit{maximal $\alpha$-leakage} is introduced. This measure quantifies the maximal gain of an adversary in refining a tilted version of its prior belief of any (potentially random) function of a dataset conditioning on a disclosed dataset. The choice of $\alpha$ determines the specific adversarial action ranging from refining a belief for $\alpha =1$ to guessing the best posterior for $\alpha = \infty$, and for these extremal values this measure simplifies to mutual information (MI) and maximal leakage (MaxL), respectively. For all other $\alpha$ this measure is shown to be the Arimoto channel capacity. Several properties of this measure are proven including: (i) quasi-convexity in the mapping between the original and disclosed datasets; (ii) data processing inequalities; and (iii) a composition property. …

Correlation Congruence for Knowledge Distillation (CCKD)
Most teacher-student frameworks based on knowledge distillation (KD) depend on a strong congruent constraint on instance level. However, they usually ignore the correlation between multiple instances, which is also valuable for knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose a new framework named correlation congruence for knowledge distillation (CCKD), which transfers not only the instance-level information, but also the correlation between instances. Furthermore, a generalized kernel method based on Taylor series expansion is proposed to better capture the correlation between instances. Empirical experiments and ablation studies on image classification tasks (including CIFAR-100, ImageNet-1K) and metric learning tasks (including ReID and Face Recognition) show that the proposed CCKD substantially outperforms the original KD and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy compared with other SOTA KD-based methods. The CCKD can be easily deployed in the majority of the teacher-student framework such as KD and hint-based learning methods. …

ConvCSNet
Compressive sensing (CS), aiming to reconstruct an image/signal from a small set of random measurements has attracted considerable attentions in recent years. Due to the high dimensionality of images, previous CS methods mainly work on image blocks to avoid the huge requirements of memory and computation, i.e., image blocks are measured with Gaussian random matrices, and the whole images are recovered from the reconstructed image blocks. Though efficient, such methods suffer from serious blocking artifacts. In this paper, we propose a convolutional CS framework that senses the whole image using a set of convolutional filters. Instead of reconstructing individual blocks, the whole image is reconstructed from the linear convolutional measurements. Specifically, the convolutional CS is implemented based on a convolutional neural network (CNN), which performs both the convolutional CS and nonlinear reconstruction. Through end-to-end training, the sensing filters and the reconstruction network can be jointly optimized. To facilitate the design of the CS reconstruction network, a novel two-branch CNN inspired from a sparsity-based CS reconstruction model is developed. Experimental results show that the proposed method substantially outperforms previous state-of-the-art CS methods in term of both PSNR and visual quality. …

Hierarchical Attention-Based Temporal Convolutional Network (HA-TCN)
Myotonia, which refers to delayed muscle relaxation after contraction, is the main symptom of myotonic dystrophy patients. We propose a hierarchical attention-based temporal convolutional network (HA-TCN) for myotonic dystrohpy diagnosis from handgrip time series data, and introduce mechanisms that enable model explainability. We compare the performance of the HA-TCN model against that of benchmark TCN models, LSTM models with and without attention mechanisms, and SVM approaches with handcrafted features. In terms of classification accuracy and F1 score, we found all deep learning models have similar levels of performance, and they all outperform SVM. Further, the HA-TCN model outperforms its TCN counterpart with regards to computational efficiency regardless of network depth, and in terms of performance particularly when the number of hidden layers is small. Lastly, HA-TCN models can consistently identify relevant time series segments in the relaxation phase of the handgrip time series, and exhibit increased robustness to noise when compared to attention-based LSTM models. …