With the ever-growing model size and the limited availability of labeled training data, transfer learning has become an increasingly popular approach in many science and engineering domains. For classification problems, this work delves into the mystery of transfer learning through an intriguing phenomenon termed neural collapse (NC), where the last-layer features and classifiers of learned deep networks satisfy: (i) the within-class variability of the features collapses to zero, and (ii) the between-class feature means are maximally and equally separated. Through the lens of NC, our findings for transfer learning are the following: (i) when pre-training models, preventing intra-class variability collapse (to a certain extent) better preserves the intrinsic structures of the input data, so that it leads to better model transferability; (ii) when fine-tuning models on downstream tasks, obtaining features with more NC on downstream data results in better test accuracy on the given task. The above results not only demystify many widely used heuristics in model pre-training (e.g., data augmentation, projection head, self-supervised learning), but also leads to more efficient and principled fine-tuning method on downstream tasks that we demonstrate through extensive experimental results.

Deep learning has been widely used in the perception (e.g., 3D object detection) of intelligent vehicle driving. Due to the beneficial Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication, the deep learning based features from other agents can be shared to the ego vehicle so as to improve the perception of the ego vehicle. It is named as Cooperative Perception in the V2V research, whose algorithms have been dramatically advanced recently. However, all the existing cooperative perception algorithms assume the ideal V2V communication without considering the possible lossy shared features because of the Lossy Communication (LC) which is common in the complex real-world driving scenarios. In this paper, we first study the side effect (e.g., detection performance drop) by the lossy communication in the V2V Cooperative Perception, and then we propose a novel intermediate LC-aware feature fusion method to relieve the side effect of lossy communication by a LC-aware Repair Network (LCRN) and enhance the interaction between the ego vehicle and other vehicles by a specially designed V2V Attention Module (V2VAM) including intra-vehicle attention of ego vehicle and uncertainty-aware inter-vehicle attention. The extensive experiment on the public cooperative perception dataset OPV2V (based on digital-twin CARLA simulator) demonstrates that the proposed method is quite effective for the cooperative point cloud based 3D object detection under lossy V2V communication.

The security of artificial intelligence (AI) is an important research area towards safe, reliable, and trustworthy AI systems. To accelerate the research on AI security, the Artificial Intelligence Security Competition (AISC) was organized by the Zhongguancun Laboratory, China Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University, and RealAI as part of the Zhongguancun International Frontier Technology Innovation Competition (https://www.zgc-aisc.com/en). The competition consists of three tracks, including Deepfake Security Competition, Autonomous Driving Security Competition, and Face Recognition Security Competition. This report will introduce the competition rules of these three tracks and the solutions of top-ranking teams in each track.

Understanding objects is a central building block of artificial intelligence, especially for embodied AI. Even though object recognition excels with deep learning, current machines still struggle to learn higher-level knowledge, e.g., what attributes an object has, and what can we do with an object. In this work, we propose a challenging Object Concept Learning (OCL) task to push the envelope of object understanding. It requires machines to reason out object affordances and simultaneously give the reason: what attributes make an object possesses these affordances. To support OCL, we build a densely annotated knowledge base including extensive labels for three levels of object concept (category, attribute, affordance), and the causal relations of three levels. By analyzing the causal structure of OCL, we present a baseline, Object Concept Reasoning Network (OCRN). It leverages causal intervention and concept instantiation to infer the three levels following their causal relations. In experiments, OCRN effectively infers the object knowledge while following the causalities well. Our data and code are available at https://mvig-rhos.com/ocl.

Swarm learning (SL) is an emerging promising decentralized machine learning paradigm and has achieved high performance in clinical applications. SL solves the problem of a central structure in federated learning by combining edge computing and blockchain-based peer-to-peer network. While there are promising results in the assumption of the independent and identically distributed (IID) data across participants, SL suffers from performance degradation as the degree of the non-IID data increases. To address this problem, we propose a generative augmentation framework in swarm learning called SL-GAN, which augments the non-IID data by generating the synthetic data from participants. SL-GAN trains generators and discriminators locally, and periodically aggregation via a randomly elected coordinator in SL network. Under the standard assumptions, we theoretically prove the convergence of SL-GAN using stochastic approximations. Experimental results demonstrate that SL-GAN outperforms state-of-art methods on three real world clinical datasets including Tuberculosis, Leukemia, COVID-19.

Recently, Vehicle-to-Everything(V2X) cooperative perception has attracted increasing attention. Infrastructure sensors play a critical role in this research field, however, how to find the optimal placement of infrastructure sensors is rarely studied. In this paper, we investigate the problem of infrastructure sensor placement and propose a pipeline that can efficiently and effectively find optimal installation positions for infrastructure sensors in a realistic simulated environment. To better simulate and evaluate LiDAR placement, we establish a Realistic LiDAR Simulation library that can simulate the unique characteristics of different popular LiDARs and produce high-fidelity LiDAR point clouds in the CARLA simulator. Through simulating point cloud data in different LiDAR placements, we can evaluate the perception accuracy of these placements using multiple detection models. Then, we analyze the correlation between the point cloud distribution and perception accuracy by calculating the density and uniformity of regions of interest. Experiments show that the placement of infrastructure LiDAR can heavily affect the accuracy of perception. We also analyze the correlation between perception performance in the region of interest and LiDAR point cloud distribution and validate that density and uniformity can be indicators of performance.

System auditing has emerged as a key approach for monitoring system call events and investigating sophisticated attacks. Based on the collected audit logs, research has proposed to search for attack patterns or track the causal dependencies of system events to reveal the attack sequence. However, existing approaches either cannot reveal long-range attack sequences or suffer from the dependency explosion problem due to a lack of focus on attack-relevant parts, and thus are insufficient for investigating complex attacks. To bridge the gap, we propose Zebra, a system that synergistically integrates attack pattern search and causal dependency tracking for efficient attack investigation. With Zebra, security analysts can alternate between search and tracking to reveal the entire attack sequence in a progressive, user-guided manner, while mitigating the dependency explosion problem by prioritizing the attack-relevant parts. To enable this, Zebra provides (1) an expressive and concise domain-specific language, Tstl, for performing various types of search and tracking analyses, and (2) an optimized language execution engine for efficient execution over a big amount of auditing data. Evaluations on a broad set of attack cases demonstrate the effectiveness of Zebra in facilitating a timely attack investigation.

This paper introduces a structure-deformable land-air robot which possesses both excellent ground driving and flying ability, with smooth switching mechanism between two modes. The elaborate coupled dynamics model of the proposed robot is established, including rotors, chassis, especially the deformable structures. Furthermore, taking fusion locomotion and complex near-ground situations into consideration, a model based controller is designed for landing and mode switching under various harsh conditions, in which we realise the cooperation between fused two motion modes. The entire system is implemented in ADAMS/Simulink simulation and in practical. We conduct experiments under various complex scenarios. The results show our robot can accomplish land-air switching swiftly and smoothly, and the designed controller can effectively improve the landing flexibility and reliability.

High-quality traffic flow generation is the core module in building simulators for autonomous driving. However, the majority of available simulators are incapable of replicating traffic patterns that accurately reflect the various features of real-world data while also simulating human-like reactive responses to the tested autopilot driving strategies. Taking one step forward to addressing such a problem, we propose Realistic Interactive TrAffic flow (RITA) as an integrated component of existing driving simulators to provide high-quality traffic flow for the evaluation and optimization of the tested driving strategies. RITA is developed with fidelity, diversity, and controllability in consideration, and consists of two core modules called RITABackend and RITAKit. RITABackend is built to support vehicle-wise control and provide traffic generation models from real-world datasets, while RITAKit is developed with easy-to-use interfaces for controllable traffic generation via RITABackend. We demonstrate RITA's capacity to create diversified and high-fidelity traffic simulations in several highly interactive highway scenarios. The experimental findings demonstrate that our produced RITA traffic flows meet all three design goals, hence enhancing the completeness of driving strategy evaluation. Moreover, we showcase the possibility for further improvement of baseline strategies through online fine-tuning with RITA traffic flows.

近年来，在应用预训练的语言模型（例如Bert）上，取得了巨大进展，以获取信息检索（IR）任务。在网页中通常使用的超链接已被利用用于设计预训练目标。例如，超链接的锚文本已用于模拟查询，从而构建了巨大的查询文档对以进行预训练。但是，作为跨越两个网页的桥梁，尚未完全探索超链接的潜力。在这项工作中，我们专注于建模通过超链接连接的两个文档之间的关系，并为临时检索设计一个新的预训练目标。具体而言，我们将文档之间的关系分为四组：无链接，单向链接，对称链接和最相关的对称链接。通过比较从相邻组采样的两个文档，该模型可以逐渐提高其捕获匹配信号的能力。我们提出了一个渐进的超链接预测（{php}）框架，以探索预训练中超链接的利用。对两个大规模临时检索数据集和六个提问数据集的实验结果证明了其优于现有的预训练方法。