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Description
A defense-by-randomization framework is proposed as an effective defense mechanism against different types of adversarial attacks on neural networks. Experiments were conducted by selecting a combination of differently constructed image classification neural networks to observe which combinations applied to this framework were most effective in maximizing classification accuracy. Furthermore, the

A defense-by-randomization framework is proposed as an effective defense mechanism against different types of adversarial attacks on neural networks. Experiments were conducted by selecting a combination of differently constructed image classification neural networks to observe which combinations applied to this framework were most effective in maximizing classification accuracy. Furthermore, the reasons why particular combinations were more effective than others is explored.
ContributorsMazboudi, Yassine Ahmad (Author) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis director) / Ren, Yi (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
In the field of machine learning, reinforcement learning stands out for its ability to explore approaches to complex, high dimensional problems that outperform even expert humans. For robotic locomotion tasks reinforcement learning provides an approach to solving them without the need for unique controllers. In this thesis, two reinforcement learning

In the field of machine learning, reinforcement learning stands out for its ability to explore approaches to complex, high dimensional problems that outperform even expert humans. For robotic locomotion tasks reinforcement learning provides an approach to solving them without the need for unique controllers. In this thesis, two reinforcement learning algorithms, Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient and Group Factor Policy Search are compared based upon their performance in the bipedal walking environment provided by OpenAI gym. These algorithms are evaluated on their performance in the environment and their sample efficiency.
ContributorsMcDonald, Dax (Author) / Ben Amor, Heni (Thesis director) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2018-12
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Description
Students learn in various ways \u2014 visualization, auditory, memorizing, or making analogies. Traditional lecturing in engineering courses and the learning styles of engineering students are inharmonious causing students to be at a disadvantage based on their learning style (Felder & Silverman, 1988). My study analyzes the traditional approach to learning

Students learn in various ways \u2014 visualization, auditory, memorizing, or making analogies. Traditional lecturing in engineering courses and the learning styles of engineering students are inharmonious causing students to be at a disadvantage based on their learning style (Felder & Silverman, 1988). My study analyzes the traditional approach to learning coding skills which is unnatural to engineering students with no previous exposure and examining if visual learning enhances introductory computer science education. Visual and text-based learning are evaluated to determine how students learn introductory coding skills and associated problem solving skills. My study was conducted to observe how the two types of learning aid the students in learning how to problem solve as well as how much knowledge can be obtained in a short period of time. The application used for visual learning was Scratch and Repl.it was used for text-based learning. Two exams were made to measure the progress made by each student. The topics covered by the exam were initialization, variable reassignment, output, if statements, if else statements, nested if statements, logical operators, arrays/lists, while loop, type casting, functions, object orientation, and sorting. Analysis of the data collected in the study allow us to observe whether the traditional method of teaching programming or block-based programming is more beneficial and in what topics of introductory computer science concepts.
ContributorsVidaure, Destiny Vanessa (Author) / Meuth, Ryan (Thesis director) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
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Description
Feature embeddings differ from raw features in the sense that the former obey certain properties like notion of similarity/dissimilarity in it's embedding space. word2vec is a preeminent example in this direction, where the similarity in the embedding space is measured in terms of the cosine similarity. Such language embedding models

Feature embeddings differ from raw features in the sense that the former obey certain properties like notion of similarity/dissimilarity in it's embedding space. word2vec is a preeminent example in this direction, where the similarity in the embedding space is measured in terms of the cosine similarity. Such language embedding models have seen numerous applications in both language and vision community as they capture the information in the modality (English language) efficiently. Inspired by these language models, this work focuses on learning embedding spaces for two visual computing tasks, 1. Image Hashing 2. Zero Shot Learning. The training set was used to learn embedding spaces over which similarity/dissimilarity is measured using several distance metrics like hamming / euclidean / cosine distances. While the above-mentioned language models learn generic word embeddings, in this work task specific embeddings were learnt which can be used for Image Retrieval and Classification separately.

Image Hashing is the task of mapping images to binary codes such that some notion of user-defined similarity is preserved. The first part of this work focuses on designing a new framework that uses the hash-tags associated with web images to learn the binary codes. Such codes can be used in several applications like Image Retrieval and Image Classification. Further, this framework requires no labelled data, leaving it very inexpensive. Results show that the proposed approach surpasses the state-of-art approaches by a significant margin.

Zero-shot classification is the task of classifying the test sample into a new class which was not seen during training. This is possible by establishing a relationship between the training and the testing classes using auxiliary information. In the second part of this thesis, a framework is designed that trains using the handcrafted attribute vectors and word vectors but doesn’t require the expensive attribute vectors during test time. More specifically, an intermediate space is learnt between the word vector space and the image feature space using the hand-crafted attribute vectors. Preliminary results on two zero-shot classification datasets show that this is a promising direction to explore.
ContributorsGattupalli, Jaya Vijetha (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Venkateswara, Hemanth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) assumes to learn policies with respect to reward available from the environment but sometimes learning in a complex domain requires wisdom which comes from a wide range of experience. In behavior based robotics, it is observed that a complex behavior can be described by a combination

Traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) assumes to learn policies with respect to reward available from the environment but sometimes learning in a complex domain requires wisdom which comes from a wide range of experience. In behavior based robotics, it is observed that a complex behavior can be described by a combination of simpler behaviors. It is tempting to apply similar idea such that simpler behaviors can be combined in a meaningful way to tailor the complex combination. Such an approach would enable faster learning and modular design of behaviors. Complex behaviors can be combined with other behaviors to create even more advanced behaviors resulting in a rich set of possibilities. Similar to RL, combined behavior can keep evolving by interacting with the environment. The requirement of this method is to specify a reasonable set of simple behaviors. In this research, I present an algorithm that aims at combining behavior such that the resulting behavior has characteristics of each individual behavior. This approach has been inspired by behavior based robotics, such as the subsumption architecture and motor schema-based design. The combination algorithm outputs n weights to combine behaviors linearly. The weights are state dependent and change dynamically at every step in an episode. This idea is tested on discrete and continuous environments like OpenAI’s “Lunar Lander” and “Biped Walker”. Results are compared with related domains like Multi-objective RL, Hierarchical RL, Transfer learning, and basic RL. It is observed that the combination of behaviors is a novel way of learning which helps the agent achieve required characteristics. A combination is learned for a given state and so the agent is able to learn faster in an efficient manner compared to other similar approaches. Agent beautifully demonstrates characteristics of multiple behaviors which helps the agent to learn and adapt to the environment. Future directions are also suggested as possible extensions to this research.
ContributorsVora, Kevin Jatin (Author) / Zhang, Yu (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Praharaj, Sarbeswar (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
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Description
Machine learning models can pick up biases and spurious correlations from training data and projects and amplify these biases during inference, thus posing significant challenges in real-world settings. One approach to mitigating this is a class of methods that can identify filter out bias-inducing samples from the training datasets to

Machine learning models can pick up biases and spurious correlations from training data and projects and amplify these biases during inference, thus posing significant challenges in real-world settings. One approach to mitigating this is a class of methods that can identify filter out bias-inducing samples from the training datasets to force models to avoid being exposed to biases. However, the filtering leads to a considerable wastage of resources as most of the dataset created is discarded as biased. This work deals with avoiding the wastage of resources by identifying and quantifying the biases. I further elaborate on the implications of dataset filtering on robustness (to adversarial attacks) and generalization (to out-of-distribution samples). The findings suggest that while dataset filtering does help to improve OOD(Out-Of-Distribution) generalization, it has a significant negative impact on robustness to adversarial attacks. It also shows that transforming bias-inducing samples into adversarial samples (instead of eliminating them from the dataset) can significantly boost robustness without sacrificing generalization.
ContributorsSachdeva, Bhavdeep Singh (Author) / Baral, Chitta (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
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Description
There has been an explosion in the amount of data on the internet because of modern technology – especially image data – as a consequence of an exponential growth in the number of cameras existing in the world right now; from more extensive surveillance camera systems to billions of people

There has been an explosion in the amount of data on the internet because of modern technology – especially image data – as a consequence of an exponential growth in the number of cameras existing in the world right now; from more extensive surveillance camera systems to billions of people walking around with smartphones in their pockets that come with built-in cameras. With this sudden increase in the accessibility of cameras, most of the data that is getting captured through these devices is ending up on the internet. Researchers soon took leverage of this data by creating large-scale datasets. However, generating a dataset – let alone a large-scale one – requires a lot of man-hours. This work presents an algorithm that makes use of optical flow and feature matching, along with utilizing localization outputs from a Mask R-CNN, to generate large-scale vehicle datasets without much human supervision. Additionally, this work proposes a novel multi-view vehicle dataset (MVVdb) of 500 vehicles which is also generated using the aforementioned algorithm.There are various research problems in computer vision that can leverage a multi-view dataset, e.g., 3D pose estimation, and 3D object detection. On the other hand, a multi-view vehicle dataset can be used for a 2D image to 3D shape prediction, generation of 3D vehicle models, and even a more robust vehicle make and model recognition. In this work, a ResNet is trained on the multi-view vehicle dataset to perform vehicle re-identification, which is fundamentally similar to a vehicle make and recognition problem – also showcasing the usability of the MVVdb dataset.
ContributorsGuha, Anubhab (Author) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis advisor) / Lu, Duo (Committee member) / Banerjee, Ayan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
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Description
In recent years, there has been significant progress in deep learning and computer vision, with many models proposed that have achieved state-of-art results on various image recognition tasks. However, to explore the full potential of the advances in this field, there is an urgent need to push the processing of

In recent years, there has been significant progress in deep learning and computer vision, with many models proposed that have achieved state-of-art results on various image recognition tasks. However, to explore the full potential of the advances in this field, there is an urgent need to push the processing of deep networks from the cloud to edge devices. Unfortunately, many deep learning models cannot be efficiently implemented on edge devices as these devices are severely resource-constrained. In this thesis, I present QU-Net, a lightweight binary segmentation model based on the U-Net architecture. Traditionally, neural networks consider the entire image to be significant. However, in real-world scenarios, many regions in an image do not contain any objects of significance. These regions can be removed from the original input allowing a network to focus on the relevant regions and thus reduce computational costs. QU-Net proposes the salient regions (binary mask) that the deeper models can use as the input. Experiments show that QU-Net helped achieve a computational reduction of 25% on the Microsoft Common Objects in Context (MS COCO) dataset and 57% on the Cityscapes dataset. Moreover, QU-Net is a generalizable model that outperforms other similar works, such as Dynamic Convolutions.
ContributorsSanthosh Kumar Varma, Rahul (Author) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis advisor) / Fan, Deliang (Committee member) / Yang, Yingzhen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
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Description
Retinotopic map, the map between visual inputs on the retina and neuronal activation in brain visual areas, is one of the central topics in visual neuroscience. For human observers, the map is typically obtained by analyzing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals of cortical responses to slowly moving visual stimuli

Retinotopic map, the map between visual inputs on the retina and neuronal activation in brain visual areas, is one of the central topics in visual neuroscience. For human observers, the map is typically obtained by analyzing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals of cortical responses to slowly moving visual stimuli on the retina. Biological evidences show the retinotopic mapping is topology-preserving/topological (i.e. keep the neighboring relationship after human brain process) within each visual region. Unfortunately, due to limited spatial resolution and the signal-noise ratio of fMRI, state of art retinotopic map is not topological. The topic was to model the topology-preserving condition mathematically, fix non-topological retinotopic map with numerical methods, and improve the quality of retinotopic maps. The impose of topological condition, benefits several applications. With the topological retinotopic maps, one may have a better insight on human retinotopic maps, including better cortical magnification factor quantification, more precise description of retinotopic maps, and potentially better exam ways of in Ophthalmology clinic.
ContributorsTu, Yanshuai (Author) / Wang, Yalin (Thesis advisor) / Lu, Zhong-Lin (Committee member) / Crook, Sharon (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Zhang, Yu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
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Description
Multimodal reasoning is one of the most interesting research fields because of the ability to interact with systems and the explainability of the models' behavior. Traditional multimodal research problems do not focus on complex commonsense reasoning (such as physical interactions). Although real-world objects have physical properties associated with them,

Multimodal reasoning is one of the most interesting research fields because of the ability to interact with systems and the explainability of the models' behavior. Traditional multimodal research problems do not focus on complex commonsense reasoning (such as physical interactions). Although real-world objects have physical properties associated with them, many of these properties (such as mass and coefficient of friction) are not captured directly by the imaging pipeline. Videos often capture objects, their motion, and the interactions between different objects. However, these properties can be estimated by utilizing cues from relative object motion and the dynamics introduced by collisions. This thesis introduces a new video question-answering task for reasoning about the implicit physical properties of objects in a scene, from videos. For this task, I introduce a dataset -- CRIPP-VQA (Counterfactual Reasoning about Implicit Physical Properties - Video Question Answering), which contains videos of objects in motion, annotated with hypothetical/counterfactual questions about the effect of actions (such as removing, adding, or replacing objects), questions about planning (choosing actions to perform to reach a particular goal), as well as descriptive questions about the visible properties of objects. Further, I benchmark the performance of existing video question-answering models on two test settings of CRIPP-VQA: i.i.d. and an out-of-distribution setting which contains objects with values of mass, coefficient of friction, and initial velocities that are not seen in the training distribution. Experiments reveal a surprising and significant performance gap in terms of answering questions about implicit properties (the focus of this thesis) and explicit properties (the focus of prior work) of objects.
ContributorsPatel, Maitreya Jitendra (Author) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis advisor) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Lee, Kookjin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022