Xu Zhong

Rong Huang, Wei Yao, Zhong Xu et al.

Forest land plays a vital role in global climate, ecosystems, farming and human living environments. Therefore, forest biomass estimation methods are necessary to monitor changes in the forest structure and function, which are key data in natural resources research. Although accurate forest biomass measurements are important in forest inventory and assessments, high-density measurements that involve airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) at a low flight height in large mountainous areas are highly expensive. The objective of this study was to quantify the aboveground biomass (AGB) of a plateau mountainous forest reserve using a system that synergistically combines an unmanned aircraft system (UAS)-based digital aerial camera and LiDAR to leverage their complementary advantages. In this study, we utilized digital aerial photogrammetry (DAP), which has the unique advantages of speed, high spatial resolution, and low cost, to compensate for the deficiency of forestry inventory using UAS-based LiDAR that requires terrain-following flight for high-resolution data acquisition. Combined with the sparse LiDAR points acquired by using a high-altitude and high-speed UAS for terrain extraction, dense normalized DAP point clouds can be obtained to produce an accurate and high-resolution canopy height model (CHM). Based on the CHM and spectral attributes obtained from multispectral images, we estimated and mapped the AGB of the region of interest with considerable cost efficiency. Our study supports the development of predictive models for large-scale wall-to-wall AGB mapping by leveraging the complementarity between DAP and LiDAR measurements. This work also reveals the potential of utilizing a UAS-based digital camera and LiDAR synergistically in a plateau mountainous forest area.

Zhengge Huang, Ligong Wang, Zhong Xu et al.

For the nonsymmetric saddle point problems with nonsymmetric positive definite (1,1) parts, the modified generalized shift-splitting (MGSSP) preconditioner as well as the MGSSP iteration method are derived in this paper, which generalize the MSSP preconditioner and the MSSP iteration method newly developed by Huang and Su (J. Comput. Appl. Math. 2017), respectively. The convergent and semi-convergent analysis of the MGSSP iteration method are presented, and we prove that this method is unconditionally convergent and semi-convergent. In addition, some spectral properties of the preconditioned matrix are carefully analyzed. Numerical results demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the MGSSP preconditioner and the MGSSP iteration method, and also illustrate that the MGSSP iteration method outperforms the GSS and GMSS iteration methods, and the MGSSP preconditioner is superior to the shift-splitting (SS), generalized SS (GSS), modified SS (MSS) and generalized MSS (GMSS) preconditioners for the GMRES method for solving the nonsymmetric saddle point problems.

Ying Xu, Xu Zhong, Antonio Jimeno Yepes et al.

We introduce a grey-box adversarial attack and defence framework for sentiment classification. We address the issues of differentiability, label preservation and input reconstruction for adversarial attack and defence in one unified framework. Our results show that once trained, the attacking model is capable of generating high-quality adversarial examples substantially faster (one order of magnitude less in time) than state-of-the-art attacking methods. These examples also preserve the original sentiment according to human evaluation. Additionally, our framework produces an improved classifier that is robust in defending against multiple adversarial attacking methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/ibm-aur-nlp/adv-def-text-dist.

Ying Xu, Xu Zhong, Antonio Jose Jimeno Yepes et al.

An adversarial example is an input transformed by small perturbations that machine learning models consistently misclassify. While there are a number of methods proposed to generate adversarial examples for text data, it is not trivial to assess the quality of these adversarial examples, as minor perturbations (such as changing a word in a sentence) can lead to a significant shift in their meaning, readability and classification label. In this paper, we propose an evaluation framework consisting of a set of automatic evaluation metrics and human evaluation guidelines, to rigorously assess the quality of adversarial examples based on the aforementioned properties. We experiment with six benchmark attacking methods and found that some methods generate adversarial examples with poor readability and content preservation. We also learned that multiple factors could influence the attacking performance, such as the length of the text inputs and architecture of the classifiers.