J. Philipp Benz

Jinwoo Hwang, Philipp Benz, Tae-hoon Kim

Improving multi-view aggregation is integral for multi-view pedestrian detection, which aims to obtain a bird's-eye-view pedestrian occupancy map from images captured through a set of calibrated cameras. Inspired by the success of attention modules for deep neural networks, we first propose a Homography Attention Module (HAM) which is shown to boost the performance of existing end-to-end multiview detection approaches by utilizing a novel channel gate and spatial gate. Additionally, we propose Booster-SHOT, an end-to-end convolutional approach to multiview pedestrian detection incorporating our proposed HAM as well as elements from previous approaches such as view-coherent augmentation or stacked homography transformations. Booster-SHOT achieves 92.9% and 94.2% for MODA on Wildtrack and MultiviewX respectively, outperforming the state-of-the-art by 1.4% on Wildtrack and 0.5% on MultiviewX, achieving state-of-the-art performance overall for standard evaluation metrics used in multi-view pedestrian detection.

Jonghu Jeong, Minyong Cho, Philipp Benz et al.

Deep learning models are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. These models are often deployed on the server-side and receive user data in an information-rich representation to solve a specific task, such as image classification. Since images can contain sensitive information, which users might not be willing to share, privacy protection becomes increasingly important. Adversarial Representation Learning (ARL) is a common approach to train an encoder that runs on the client-side and obfuscates an image. It is assumed, that the obfuscated image can safely be transmitted and used for the task on the server without privacy concerns. However, in this work, we find that training a reconstruction attacker can successfully recover the original image of existing ARL methods. To this end, we introduce a novel ARL method enhanced through low-pass filtering, limiting the available information amount to be encoded in the frequency domain. Our experimental results reveal that our approach withstands reconstruction attacks while outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods regarding the privacy-utility trade-off. We further conduct a user study to qualitatively assess our defense of the reconstruction attack.

Federica Spinola, Philipp Benz, Minhyeong Yu et al.

In real-world scenarios we often need to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. Multi-Task Learning (MTL) is an adequate method to do so, but usually requires datasets labeled for all tasks. We propose a method that can leverage datasets labeled for only some of the tasks in the MTL framework. Our work, Knowledge Assembly (KA), learns multiple tasks from disjoint datasets by leveraging the unlabeled data in a semi-supervised manner, using model augmentation for pseudo-supervision. Whilst KA can be implemented on any existing MTL networks, we test our method on jointly learning person re-identification (reID) and pedestrian attribute recognition (PAR). We surpass the single task fully-supervised performance by $4.2\%$ points for reID and $0.9\%$ points for PAR.

Chaoning Zhang, Philipp Benz, Adil Karjauv et al.

Existing works have identified the limitation of top-$1$ attack success rate (ASR) as a metric to evaluate the attack strength but exclusively investigated it in the white-box setting, while our work extends it to a more practical black-box setting: transferable attack. It is widely reported that stronger I-FGSM transfers worse than simple FGSM, leading to a popular belief that transferability is at odds with the white-box attack strength. Our work challenges this belief with empirical finding that stronger attack actually transfers better for the general top-$k$ ASR indicated by the interest class rank (ICR) after attack. For increasing the attack strength, with an intuitive interpretation of the logit gradient from the geometric perspective, we identify that the weakness of the commonly used losses lie in prioritizing the speed to fool the network instead of maximizing its strength. To this end, we propose a new normalized CE loss that guides the logit to be updated in the direction of implicitly maximizing its rank distance from the ground-truth class. Extensive results in various settings have verified that our proposed new loss is simple yet effective for top-$k$ attack. Code is available at: \url{https://bit.ly/3uCiomP}

Philipp Benz, Soomin Ham, Chaoning Zhang et al.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have become the de facto gold standard in computer vision applications in the past years. Recently, however, new model architectures have been proposed challenging the status quo. The Vision Transformer (ViT) relies solely on attention modules, while the MLP-Mixer architecture substitutes the self-attention modules with Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs). Despite their great success, CNNs have been widely known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, causing serious concerns for security-sensitive applications. Thus, it is critical for the community to know whether the newly proposed ViT and MLP-Mixer are also vulnerable to adversarial attacks. To this end, we empirically evaluate their adversarial robustness under several adversarial attack setups and benchmark them against the widely used CNNs. Overall, we find that the two architectures, especially ViT, are more robust than their CNN models. Using a toy example, we also provide empirical evidence that the lower adversarial robustness of CNNs can be partially attributed to their shift-invariant property. Our frequency analysis suggests that the most robust ViT architectures tend to rely more on low-frequency features compared with CNNs. Additionally, we have an intriguing finding that MLP-Mixer is extremely vulnerable to universal adversarial perturbations.

Chaoning Zhang, Chenguo Lin, Philipp Benz et al.

Data hiding is the art of concealing messages with limited perceptual changes. Recently, deep learning has enriched it from various perspectives with significant progress. In this work, we conduct a brief yet comprehensive review of existing literature for deep learning based data hiding (deep hiding) by first classifying it according to three essential properties (i.e., capacity, security and robustness), and outline three commonly used architectures. Based on this, we summarize specific strategies for different applications of data hiding, including basic hiding, steganography, watermarking and light field messaging. Finally, further insight into deep hiding is provided by incorporating the perspective of adversarial attack.

Moonyoung Lee, Yujin Heo, Jinyong Park et al.

As the aging population grows at a rapid rate, there is an ever growing need for service robot platforms that can provide daily assistance at practical speed with reliable performance. In order to assist with daily tasks such as fetching a beverage, a service robot must be able to perceive its environment and generate corresponding motion trajectories. This becomes a challenging and computationally complex problem when the environment is unknown and thus the path planner must sample numerous trajectories that often are sub-optimal, extending the execution time. To address this issue, we propose a unique strategy of integrating a 3D object detection pipeline with a kinematically optimal manipulation planner to significantly increase speed performance at runtime. In addition, we develop a new robotic butler system for a wheeled humanoid that is capable of fetching requested objects at 24% of the speed a human needs to fulfill the same task. The proposed system was evaluated and demonstrated in a real-world environment setup as well as in public exhibition.