Ali Khodabakhsh

Ali Khodabakhsh, Ger Yang, Soumya Basu et al.

Distribution network reconfiguration (DNR) is a tool used by operators to balance line load flows and mitigate losses. As distributed generation and flexible load adoption increases, the impact of DNR on the security, efficiency, and reliability of the grid will increase as well. Today, heuristic-based actions like branch exchange are routinely taken, with no theoretical guarantee of their optimality. This paper considers loss minimization via DNR, which changes the on/off status of switches in the network. The goal is to ensure a radial final configuration (called a spanning tree in the algorithms literature) that spans all network buses and connects them to the substation (called the root of the tree) through a single path. We prove that the associated combinatorial optimization problem is strongly NP-hard and thus likely cannot be solved efficiently. We formulate the loss minimization problem as a supermodular function minimization under a single matroid basis constraint, and use existing algorithms to propose a polynomial time local search algorithm for the DNR problem at hand and derive performance bounds. We show that our algorithm is equivalent to the extensively used branch exchange algorithm, for which, to the best of our knowledge, we pioneer in proposing a theoretical performance bound. Finally, we use a 33-bus network to compare our algorithm's performance to several algorithms published in the literature.

Yutong Wu, Ali Khodabakhsh, Bo Li et al.

We consider a repeated game where a player self-reports her usage of a service and is charged a payment accordingly by a center. The center observes a partial signal, representing part of the player's true consumption, which is generated from a publicly known distribution. The player can report any value that does not contradict the signal and the center issues a payment based on the reported information. Such problems find application in net metering billing in the electricity market, where a customer's actual consumption of the electricity network is masked and complete verification is impractical. When the underlying true value is relatively constant, we propose a penalty mechanism that elicits truthful self-reports. Namely, besides charging the player the reported value, the mechanism charges a penalty proportional to her inconsistent reports. We show how fear of the uncertainty in the future incentivizes the player to be truthful today. For Bernoulli distributions, we give the complete analysis and optimal strategies given any penalty. Since complete truthfulness is not possible for continuous distributions, we give approximate truthful results by a reduction from Bernoulli distributions. We also extend our mechanism to a multi-player cost sharing setting and give equilibrium results.

Ali Khodabakhsh, Zahid Akhtar

Despite the impressive progress in the field of presentation attack detection and multimedia forensics over the last decade, these systems are still vulnerable to attacks in real-life settings. Some of the challenges for existing solutions are the detection of unknown attacks, the ability to perform in adversarial settings, few-shot learning, and explainability. In this study, these limitations are approached by reliance on a game-theoretic view for modeling the interactions between the attacker and the detector. Consequently, a new optimization criterion is proposed and a set of requirements are defined for improving the performance of these systems in real-life settings. Furthermore, a novel detection technique is proposed using generator-based feature sets that are not biased towards any specific attack species. To further optimize the performance on known attacks, a new loss function coined categorical margin maximization loss (C-marmax) is proposed which gradually improves the performance against the most powerful attack. The proposed approach provides a more balanced performance across known and unknown attacks and achieves state-of-the-art performance in known and unknown attack detection cases against rational attackers. Lastly, the few-shot learning potential of the proposed approach is studied as well as its ability to provide pixel-level explainability.

Ali Khodabakhsh, Evdokia Nikolova

We consider the problem of maximizing a non-monotone DR-submodular function subject to a cardinality constraint. Diminishing returns (DR) submodularity is a generalization of the diminishing returns property for functions defined over the integer lattice. This generalization can be used to solve many machine learning or combinatorial optimization problems such as optimal budget allocation, revenue maximization, etc. In this work we propose the first polynomial-time approximation algorithms for non-monotone constrained maximization. We implement our algorithms for a revenue maximization problem with a real-world dataset to check their efficiency and performance.

Ali Khodabakhsh, Cenk Demiroglu

Speaker verification systems are vulnerable to spoofing attacks which presents a major problem in their real-life deployment. To date, most of the proposed synthetic speech detectors (SSDs) have weighted the importance of different segments of speech equally. However, different attack methods have different strengths and weaknesses and the traces that they leave may be short or long term acoustic artifacts. Moreover, those may occur for only particular phonemes or sounds. Here, we propose three algorithms that weigh likelihood-ratio scores of individual frames, phonemes, and sound-classes depending on their importance for the SSD. Significant improvement over the baseline system has been obtained for known attack methods that were used in training the SSDs. However, improvement with unknown attack types was not substantial. Thus, the type of distortions that were caused by the unknown systems were different and could not be captured better with the proposed SSD compared to the baseline SSD.

Ali Khodabakhsh, Seyyed Saeed Sarfjoo, Umut Uludag et al.

In recent years identity-vector (i-vector) based speaker verification (SV) systems have become very successful. Nevertheless, environmental noise and speech duration variability still have a significant effect on degrading the performance of these systems. In many real-life applications, duration of recordings are very short; as a result, extracted i-vectors cannot reliably represent the attributes of the speaker. Here, we investigate the effect of speech duration on the performance of three state-of-the-art speaker recognition systems. In addition, using a variety of available score fusion methods, we investigate the effect of score fusion for those speaker verification techniques to benefit from the performance difference of different methods under different enrollment and test speech duration conditions. This technique performed significantly better than the baseline score fusion methods.