Steven R. Young

Haley Duba-Sullivan, Steven R. Young, Emma J. Reid

Data-driven super-resolution (SR) methods are often integrated into imaging pipelines as preprocessing steps to improve downstream tasks such as classification and detection. However, these SR models introduce a previously unexplored attack surface into imaging pipelines. In this paper, we present AdvSR, a framework demonstrating that adversarial behavior can be embedded directly into SR model weights during training, requiring no access to inputs at inference time. Unlike prior attacks that perturb inputs or rely on backdoor triggers, AdvSR operates entirely at the model level. By jointly optimizing for reconstruction quality and targeted adversarial outcomes, AdvSR produces models that appear benign under standard image quality metrics while inducing downstream misclassification. We evaluate AdvSR on three SR architectures (SRCNN, EDSR, SwinIR) paired with a YOLOv11 classifier and demonstrate that AdvSR models can achieve high attack success rates with minimal quality degradation. These findings highlight a new model-level threat for imaging pipelines, with implications for how practitioners source and validate models in safety-critical applications.

Maryam Parsa, Catherine D. Schuman, Prasanna Date et al.

Training neural networks for neuromorphic deployment is non-trivial. There have been a variety of approaches proposed to adapt back-propagation or back-propagation-like algorithms appropriate for training. Considering that these networks often have very different performance characteristics than traditional neural networks, it is often unclear how to set either the network topology or the hyperparameters to achieve optimal performance. In this work, we introduce a Bayesian approach for optimizing the hyperparameters of an algorithm for training binary communication networks that can be deployed to neuromorphic hardware. We show that by optimizing the hyperparameters on this algorithm for each dataset, we can achieve improvements in accuracy over the previous state-of-the-art for this algorithm on each dataset (by up to 15 percent). This jump in performance continues to emphasize the potential when converting traditional neural networks to binary communication applicable to neuromorphic hardware.

Drahomira Herrmannova, Steven R. Young, Robert M. Patton et al.

Identifying and extracting data elements such as study descriptors in publication full texts is a critical yet manual and labor-intensive step required in a number of tasks. In this paper we address the question of identifying data elements in an unsupervised manner. Specifically, provided a set of criteria describing specific study parameters, such as species, route of administration, and dosing regimen, we develop an unsupervised approach to identify text segments (sentences) relevant to the criteria. A binary classifier trained to identify publications that met the criteria performs better when trained on the candidate sentences than when trained on sentences randomly picked from the text, supporting the intuition that our method is able to accurately identify study descriptors.

Thomas E. Potok, Catherine Schuman, Steven R. Young et al.

Current Deep Learning approaches have been very successful using convolutional neural networks (CNN) trained on large graphical processing units (GPU)-based computers. Three limitations of this approach are: 1) they are based on a simple layered network topology, i.e., highly connected layers, without intra-layer connections; 2) the networks are manually configured to achieve optimal results, and 3) the implementation of neuron model is expensive in both cost and power. In this paper, we evaluate deep learning models using three different computing architectures to address these problems: quantum computing to train complex topologies, high performance computing (HPC) to automatically determine network topology, and neuromorphic computing for a low-power hardware implementation. We use the MNIST dataset for our experiment, due to input size limitations of current quantum computers. Our results show the feasibility of using the three architectures in tandem to address the above deep learning limitations. We show a quantum computer can find high quality values of intra-layer connections weights, in a tractable time as the complexity of the network increases; a high performance computer can find optimal layer-based topologies; and a neuromorphic computer can represent the complex topology and weights derived from the other architectures in low power memristive hardware.