Bin Liang

Jianan Feng, Jiachun Li, Changqing Miao et al.

Object detection has found extensive applications in various tasks, but it is also susceptible to adversarial patch attacks. The ideal defense should be effective, efficient, easy to deploy, and capable of withstanding adaptive attacks. In this paper, we adopt a counterattack strategy to propose a novel and general methodology for defending adversarial attacks. Two types of defensive patches, canary and woodpecker, are specially-crafted and injected into the model input to proactively probe or counteract potential adversarial patches. In this manner, adversarial patch attacks can be effectively detected by simply analyzing the model output, without the need to alter the target model. Moreover, we employ randomized canary and woodpecker injection patterns to defend against defense-aware attacks. The effectiveness and practicality of the proposed method are demonstrated through comprehensive experiments. The results illustrate that canary and woodpecker achieve high performance, even when confronted with unknown attack methods, while incurring limited time overhead. Furthermore, our method also exhibits sufficient robustness against defense-aware attacks, as evidenced by adaptive attack experiments.

Yuhua Jiang, Qihan Liu, Yiqin Yang et al.

Exploration in sparse reward environments remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning, particularly in Contextual Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs), where environments differ across episodes. Existing episodic intrinsic motivation methods for CMDPs primarily rely on count-based approaches, which are ineffective in large state spaces, or on similarity-based methods that lack appropriate metrics for state comparison. To address these shortcomings, we propose Episodic Novelty Through Temporal Distance (ETD), a novel approach that introduces temporal distance as a robust metric for state similarity and intrinsic reward computation. By employing contrastive learning, ETD accurately estimates temporal distances and derives intrinsic rewards based on the novelty of states within the current episode. Extensive experiments on various benchmark tasks demonstrate that ETD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing exploration in sparse reward CMDPs.

Boyang Xue, Hongru Wang, Rui Wang et al.

The tendency of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate hallucinations raises concerns regarding their reliability. Therefore, confidence estimations indicating the extent of trustworthiness of the generations become essential. However, current LLM confidence estimations in languages other than English remain underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a comprehensive investigation of Multilingual Confidence estimation (MlingConf) on LLMs, focusing on both language-agnostic (LA) and language-specific (LS) tasks to explore the performance and language dominance effects of multilingual confidence estimations on different tasks. The benchmark comprises four meticulously checked and human-evaluate high-quality multilingual datasets for LA tasks and one for the LS task tailored to specific social, cultural, and geographical contexts of a language. Our experiments reveal that on LA tasks English exhibits notable linguistic dominance in confidence estimations than other languages, while on LS tasks, using question-related language to prompt LLMs demonstrates better linguistic dominance in multilingual confidence estimations. The phenomena inspire a simple yet effective native-tone prompting strategy by employing language-specific prompts for LS tasks, effectively improving LLMs' reliability and accuracy on LS tasks.

Qiyue Yin, Jun Yang, Kaiqi Huang et al.

With breakthrough of the AlphaGo, human-computer gaming AI has ushered in a big explosion, attracting more and more researchers all around the world. As a recognized standard for testing artificial intelligence, various human-computer gaming AI systems (AIs) have been developed such as the Libratus, OpenAI Five and AlphaStar, beating professional human players. The rapid development of human-computer gaming AIs indicate a big step of decision making intelligence, and it seems that current techniques can handle very complex human-computer games. So, one natural question raises: what are the possible challenges of current techniques in human-computer gaming, and what are the future trends? To answer the above question, in this paper, we survey recent successful game AIs, covering board game AIs, card game AIs, first-person shooting game AIs and real time strategy game AIs. Through this survey, we 1) compare the main difficulties among different kinds of games and the corresponding techniques utilized for achieving professional human level AIs; 2) summarize the mainstream frameworks and techniques that can be properly relied on for developing AIs for complex human-computer gaming; 3) raise the challenges or drawbacks of current techniques in the successful AIs; and 4) try to point out future trends in human-computer gaming AIs. Finally, we hope this brief review can provide an introduction for beginners, and inspire insights for researchers in the field of AI in human-computer gaming.

Jiachun Li, Jianan Feng, Jianjun Huang et al.

Recently, object detection has proven vulnerable to adversarial patch attacks. The attackers holding a specially crafted patch can hide themselves from state-of-the-art detectors, e.g., YOLO, even in the physical world. This attack can bring serious security threats, such as escaping from surveillance cameras. How to effectively detect this kind of adversarial examples to catch potential attacks has become an important problem. In this paper, we propose two detection methods: the signature-based method and the signature-independent method. First, we identify two signatures of existing adversarial patches that can be utilized to precisely locate patches within adversarial examples. By employing the signatures, a fast signature-based method is developed to detect the adversarial objects. Second, we present a robust signature-independent method based on the \textit{content semantics consistency} of model outputs. Adversarial objects violate this consistency, appearing locally but disappearing globally, while benign ones remain consistently present. The experiments demonstrate that two proposed methods can effectively detect attacks both in the digital and physical world. These methods each offer distinct advantage. Specifically, the signature-based method is capable of real-time detection, while the signature-independent method can detect unknown adversarial patch attacks and makes defense-aware attacks almost impossible to perform.

Bin Liang, Hongcheng Li, Miaoqiang Su et al.

In this paper, we present an effective method to craft text adversarial samples, revealing one important yet underestimated fact that DNN-based text classifiers are also prone to adversarial sample attack. Specifically, confronted with different adversarial scenarios, the text items that are important for classification are identified by computing the cost gradients of the input (white-box attack) or generating a series of occluded test samples (black-box attack). Based on these items, we design three perturbation strategies, namely insertion, modification, and removal, to generate adversarial samples. The experiment results show that the adversarial samples generated by our method can successfully fool both state-of-the-art character-level and word-level DNN-based text classifiers. The adversarial samples can be perturbed to any desirable classes without compromising their utilities. At the same time, the introduced perturbation is difficult to be perceived.