在这项工作中，我们提出了一个说话者的匿名管道，该管道利用高质量的自动语音识别和合成系统来生成以语音转录和匿名扬声器嵌入为条件的语音。使用电话作为中间表示，可确保从输入中完全消除说话者身份信息，同时尽可能保留原始的语音内容。我们在Librispeech和VCTK Corpora上的实验结果揭示了两个关键发现：1）尽管自动语音识别会产生不完美的转录，但我们的神经语音合成系统可以处理此类错误，使我们的系统可行且健壮，并且2）结合来自不同资源的扬声器嵌入，有益及其适当的归一化至关重要。总体而言，我们的最终最佳系统在2020年语音隐私挑战挑战中提供的基线在与懒惰的攻击者的稳健性方面相当大，同时保持了匿名语音的高度理解性和自然性。

反事实解释为从机器学习模型中获得预期结果的方法提供了信息。但是，这种解释对基础模型的某些现实世界变化（例如，重新训练模型，更改的超参数等）并不强大，质疑其在多种应用程序中的可靠性，例如信用贷款。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种新颖的策略 - 我们称之为Robx，以生成基于树的合奏，例如XGBoost的强大反事实。基于树的合奏在强大的反事实生成中提出了其他挑战，例如，它们具有非平滑和非差异的目标函数，并且在非常相似的数据上，它们可以在RETOR下的参数空间中进行很多更改。我们首先引入了一种新颖的指标（我们称之为反事实稳定性），该指标试图量化反事实的鲁棒性将是为了模拟重新训练下的变化，并具有理想的理论属性。我们提出的策略ROBX使用任何反事实生成方法（基本方法），并通过使用我们的度量反事实稳定性迭代地完善基本方法生成的反事实来搜索强大的反事实。我们将ROBX的性能与基于基准数据集的流行反事实生成方法（对于基于树的合奏）进行了比较。结果表明，我们的策略会产生反事实，这些反事实是强大的（实际模型更改后的有效性近100％），并且在现有最新方法上也是现实的（就局部异常因素而言）。

Panoptic Part Segmentation (PPS) unifies panoptic segmentation and part segmentation into one task. Previous works utilize separated approaches to handle thing, stuff, and part predictions without shared computation and task association. We aim to unify these tasks at the architectural level, designing the first end-to-end unified framework named Panoptic-PartFormer. Moreover, we find the previous metric PartPQ biases to PQ. To handle both issues, we make the following contributions: Firstly, we design a meta-architecture that decouples part feature and things/stuff feature, respectively. We model things, stuff, and parts as object queries and directly learn to optimize all three forms of prediction as a unified mask prediction and classification problem. We term our model as Panoptic-PartFormer. Secondly, we propose a new metric Part-Whole Quality (PWQ) to better measure such task from both pixel-region and part-whole perspectives. It can also decouple the error for part segmentation and panoptic segmentation. Thirdly, inspired by Mask2Former, based on our meta-architecture, we propose Panoptic-PartFormer++ and design a new part-whole cross attention scheme to further boost part segmentation qualities. We design a new part-whole interaction method using masked cross attention. Finally, the extensive ablation studies and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of both Panoptic-PartFormer and Panoptic-PartFormer++. Compared with previous Panoptic-PartFormer, our Panoptic-PartFormer++ achieves 2% PartPQ and 3% PWQ improvements on the Cityscapes PPS dataset and 5% PartPQ on the Pascal Context PPS dataset. On both datasets, Panoptic-PartFormer++ achieves new state-of-the-art results with a significant cost drop of 70% on GFlops and 50% on parameters. Our models can serve as a strong baseline and aid future research in PPS. Code will be available.

Vision transformers have emerged as powerful tools for many computer vision tasks. It has been shown that their features and class tokens can be used for salient object segmentation. However, the properties of segmentation transformers remain largely unstudied. In this work we conduct an in-depth study of the spatial attentions of different backbone layers of semantic segmentation transformers and uncover interesting properties. The spatial attentions of a patch intersecting with an object tend to concentrate within the object, whereas the attentions of larger, more uniform image areas rather follow a diffusive behavior. In other words, vision transformers trained to segment a fixed set of object classes generalize to objects well beyond this set. We exploit this by extracting heatmaps that can be used to segment unknown objects within diverse backgrounds, such as obstacles in traffic scenes. Our method is training-free and its computational overhead negligible. We use off-the-shelf transformers trained for street-scene segmentation to process other scene types.

Vision transformers (ViTs) encoding an image as a sequence of patches bring new paradigms for semantic segmentation.We present an efficient framework of representation separation in local-patch level and global-region level for semantic segmentation with ViTs. It is targeted for the peculiar over-smoothness of ViTs in semantic segmentation, and therefore differs from current popular paradigms of context modeling and most existing related methods reinforcing the advantage of attention. We first deliver the decoupled two-pathway network in which another pathway enhances and passes down local-patch discrepancy complementary to global representations of transformers. We then propose the spatially adaptive separation module to obtain more separate deep representations and the discriminative cross-attention which yields more discriminative region representations through novel auxiliary supervisions. The proposed methods achieve some impressive results: 1) incorporated with large-scale plain ViTs, our methods achieve new state-of-the-art performances on five widely used benchmarks; 2) using masked pre-trained plain ViTs, we achieve 68.9% mIoU on Pascal Context, setting a new record; 3) pyramid ViTs integrated with the decoupled two-pathway network even surpass the well-designed high-resolution ViTs on Cityscapes; 4) the improved representations by our framework have favorable transferability in images with natural corruptions. The codes will be released publicly.

The following article presents a memetic algorithm with applying deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for solving practically oriented dual resource constrained flexible job shop scheduling problems (DRC-FJSSP). In recent years, there has been extensive research on DRL techniques, but without considering realistic, flexible and human-centered shopfloors. A research gap can be identified in the context of make-to-order oriented discontinuous manufacturing as it is often represented in medium-size companies with high service levels. From practical industry projects in this domain, we recognize requirements to depict flexible machines, human workers and capabilities, setup and processing operations, material arrival times, complex job paths with parallel tasks for bill of material (BOM) manufacturing, sequence-depended setup times and (partially) automated tasks. On the other hand, intensive research has been done on metaheuristics in the context of DRC-FJSSP. However, there is a lack of suitable and generic scheduling methods that can be holistically applied in sociotechnical production and assembly processes. In this paper, we first formulate an extended DRC-FJSSP induced by the practical requirements mentioned. Then we present our proposed hybrid framework with parallel computing for multicriteria optimization. Through numerical experiments with real-world data, we confirm that the framework generates feasible schedules efficiently and reliably. Utilizing DRL instead of random operations leads to better results and outperforms traditional approaches.

Active learning as a paradigm in deep learning is especially important in applications involving intricate perception tasks such as object detection where labels are difficult and expensive to acquire. Development of active learning methods in such fields is highly computationally expensive and time consuming which obstructs the progression of research and leads to a lack of comparability between methods. In this work, we propose and investigate a sandbox setup for rapid development and transparent evaluation of active learning in deep object detection. Our experiments with commonly used configurations of datasets and detection architectures found in the literature show that results obtained in our sandbox environment are representative of results on standard configurations. The total compute time to obtain results and assess the learning behavior can thereby be reduced by factors of up to 14 when comparing with Pascal VOC and up to 32 when comparing with BDD100k. This allows for testing and evaluating data acquisition and labeling strategies in under half a day and contributes to the transparency and development speed in the field of active learning for object detection.

Segmentation of lidar data is a task that provides rich, point-wise information about the environment of robots or autonomous vehicles. Currently best performing neural networks for lidar segmentation are fine-tuned to specific datasets. Switching the lidar sensor without retraining on a big set of annotated data from the new sensor creates a domain shift, which causes the network performance to drop drastically. In this work we propose a new method for lidar domain adaption, in which we use annotated panoptic lidar datasets and recreate the recorded scenes in the structure of a different lidar sensor. We narrow the domain gap to the target data by recreating panoptic data from one domain in another and mixing the generated data with parts of (pseudo) labeled target domain data. Our method improves the nuScenes to SemanticKITTI unsupervised domain adaptation performance by 15.2 mean Intersection over Union points (mIoU) and by 48.3 mIoU in our semi-supervised approach. We demonstrate a similar improvement for the SemanticKITTI to nuScenes domain adaptation by 21.8 mIoU and 51.5 mIoU, respectively. We compare our method with two state of the art approaches for semantic lidar segmentation domain adaptation with a significant improvement for unsupervised and semi-supervised domain adaptation. Furthermore we successfully apply our proposed method to two entirely unlabeled datasets of two state of the art lidar sensors Velodyne Alpha Prime and InnovizTwo, and train well performing semantic segmentation networks for both.

Explanations are crucial parts of deep neural network (DNN) classifiers. In high stakes applications, faithful and robust explanations are important to understand and gain trust in DNN classifiers. However, recent work has shown that state-of-the-art attribution methods in text classifiers are susceptible to imperceptible adversarial perturbations that alter explanations significantly while maintaining the correct prediction outcome. If undetected, this can critically mislead the users of DNNs. Thus, it is crucial to understand the influence of such adversarial perturbations on the networks' explanations and their perceptibility. In this work, we establish a novel definition of attribution robustness (AR) in text classification, based on Lipschitz continuity. Crucially, it reflects both attribution change induced by adversarial input alterations and perceptibility of such alterations. Moreover, we introduce a wide set of text similarity measures to effectively capture locality between two text samples and imperceptibility of adversarial perturbations in text. We then propose our novel TransformerExplanationAttack (TEA), a strong adversary that provides a tight estimation for attribution robustness in text classification. TEA uses state-of-the-art language models to extract word substitutions that result in fluent, contextual adversarial samples. Finally, with experiments on several text classification architectures, we show that TEA consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art AR estimators, yielding perturbations that alter explanations to a greater extent while being more fluent and less perceptible.

Backdoor attacks represent one of the major threats to machine learning models. Various efforts have been made to mitigate backdoors. However, existing defenses have become increasingly complex and often require high computational resources or may also jeopardize models' utility. In this work, we show that fine-tuning, one of the most common and easy-to-adopt machine learning training operations, can effectively remove backdoors from machine learning models while maintaining high model utility. Extensive experiments over three machine learning paradigms show that fine-tuning and our newly proposed super-fine-tuning achieve strong defense performance. Furthermore, we coin a new term, namely backdoor sequela, to measure the changes in model vulnerabilities to other attacks before and after the backdoor has been removed. Empirical evaluation shows that, compared to other defense methods, super-fine-tuning leaves limited backdoor sequela. We hope our results can help machine learning model owners better protect their models from backdoor threats. Also, it calls for the design of more advanced attacks in order to comprehensively assess machine learning models' backdoor vulnerabilities.