Despite a plethora of anomaly detection models developed over the years, their ability to generalize to unseen anomalies remains an issue, particularly in critical systems. This paper aims to address this challenge by introducing Swift Hydra, a new framework for training an anomaly detection method based on generative AI and reinforcement learning (RL). Through featuring an RL policy that operates on the latent variables of a generative model, the framework synthesizes novel and diverse anomaly samples that are capable of bypassing a detection model. These generated synthetic samples are, in turn, used to augment the detection model, further improving its ability to handle challenging anomalies. Swift Hydra also incorporates Mamba models structured as a Mixture of Experts (MoE) to enable scalable adaptation of the number of Mamba experts based on data complexity, effectively capturing diverse feature distributions without increasing the model’s inference time. Empirical evaluations on ADBench benchmark demonstrate that Swift Hydra outperforms other state-of-the-art anomaly detection models while maintaining a relatively short inference time. From these results, our research highlights a new and auspicious paradigm of integrating RL and generative AI for advancing anomaly detection.

Surrogate models are used to predict the behavior of complex energy systems that are too expensive to simulate with traditional numerical methods. Our work introduces the use of language descriptions, which we call "system captions" or SysCaps, to interface with such surrogates. We argue that interacting with surrogates through text, particularly natural language, makes these models more accessible for both experts and non-experts. We introduce a lightweight multimodal text and timeseries regression model and a training pipeline that uses large language models (LLMs) to synthesize high-quality captions from simulation metadata. Our experiments on two real-world simulators of buildings and wind farms show that our SysCaps-augmented surrogates have better accuracy on held-out systems than traditional methods while enjoying new generalization abilities, such as handling semantically related descriptions of the same test system. Additional experiments also highlight the potential of SysCaps to unlock language-driven design space exploration and to regularize training through prompt augmentation.

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative learning among clients via a coordinating server while avoiding direct data sharing, offering a perceived solution to preserve privacy. However, recent studies on Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) have challenged this notion, showing high success rates against unprotected training data. While local differential privacy (LDP) is widely regarded as a gold standard for privacy protection in data analysis, most studies on MIAs either neglect LDP or fail to provide theoretical guarantees for attack success against LDP-protected data. To address this gap, we derive theoretical lower bounds for the success rates of low-polynomial-time MIAs that exploit vulnerabilities in fully connected or self-attention layers, regardless of the LDP mechanism used. We establish that even when data are protected by LDP, privacy risks persist, depending on the privacy budget. Practical evaluations on models like ResNet and Vision Transformer confirm considerable privacy risks, revealing that the noise required to mitigate these attacks significantly degrades models' utility.

Despite its significant benefits in enhancing the transparency and trustworthiness of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, explainable AI (XAI) can unintentionally provide adversaries with insights into blackbox models, increasing their vulnerability to various attacks. In this paper, we develop a novel explanation-driven adversarial attack against blackbox classifiers based on feature substitution, called XSub. The key idea of XSub is to strategically replace important features (identified via XAI) in the original sample with corresponding important features of a different label, thereby increasing the likelihood of the model misclassifying the perturbed sample. XSub only requires a minimal number of queries and can be easily extended to launch backdoor attacks in case the attacker has access to the model’s training data. Our evaluation shows that XSub is not only effective and stealthy but also low-cost, showcasing its feasibility across a wide range of AI applications.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in applications with matching inference and training distributions. In realworld scenarios, DNNs have to cope with truly new data samples during inference, potentially coming from a shifted data distribution. This usually causes a drop in performance. Acoustic scene classification (ASC) with different recording devices is one of this situation. Furthermore, an imbalance in quality and amount of data recorded by different devices causes severe challenges. In this paper, we introduce two calibration methods to tackle these challenges. In particular, we applied scaling of the features to deal with varying frequency response of the recording devices. Furthermore, to account for the shifted data distribution, a heated-up softmax is embedded to calibrate the predictions of the model. We use robust and resource-efficient models, and show the efficiency of heated-up softmax. Our ASC system reaches state-of-the-art performance on the development set of DCASE challenge 2019 task 1B with only ~70K parameters. It achieves 70.1% average classification accuracy for device B and device C. It performs on par with the best single model system of the DCASE 2019 challenge and outperforms the baseline system by 28.7% (absolute).

Recently, a mismatch in acoustic conditions such as a temporal recording gap as well as different recording devices for the development and the evaluation data has been considered in Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC). This brings ASC closer to real-world conditions. In this paper, we address ASC with mismatching recording devices. This has been introduced as task 1B of the DCASE 2018 challenge. We proposed a flexible and robust model that uses a mixture of experts (MoE) layer replacing the fully connected dense layer such that each expert can adapt to the specific domains of the data. Furthermore, we observe different Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models as well as the number of the experts of the MoE dense layer using log mel features. In addition, we perform mixup data augmentation to enhance the robustness of our models. In experiments, the classification performance is 66.1% using 15 experts in the MoE dense layer with approximately 2M parameters. This outperforms the best model of task 1B of the DCASE 2018 challenge by 2.5% (absolute). This model uses an ensemble selection of 12 individual models with ~12M parameters.

We propose a heterogeneous system of Deep Mixture of Experts (DMoEs) models using different Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for acoustic scene classification (ASC). Each DMoEs module is a mixture of different parallel CNN structures weighted by a gating network. All CNNs use the same input data. The CNN architectures play the role of experts extracting a variety of features. The experts are pre-trained, and kept fixed (frozen) for the DMoEs model. The DMoEs is post-trained by optimizing weights of the gating network, which estimates the contribution of the experts in the mixture. In order to enhance the performance, we use an ensemble of three DMoEs modules each with different pairs of inputs and individual CNN models. The input pairs are spectrogram combinations of binaural audio and mono audio as well as their pre-processed variations using harmonic-percussive source separation (HPSS) and nearest neighbor filters (NNFs). The classification result of the proposed system is 72.1% improving the baseline by around 12% (absolute) on the development data of DCASE 2018 challenge task 1A.

We present the design and evaluation of a technique for influencing user respiration by integrating respiration-pacing methods into the desktop operating system in a peripheral manner. Peripheral paced respiration differs from prior techniques in that it does not require the user's full attention. We conducted a within-subjects study to evaluate the efficacy of peripheral paced respiration, as compared to no feedback, in an ecologically valid environment. Participant respiration decreased significantly in the pacing condition. Upon further analysis, we attribute this difference to a significant decrease in breath rate while the intermittent pacing feedback is active, rather than a persistent change in respiratory pattern. The results have implications for researchers in physiological computing, biofeedback designers, and human-computer interaction researchers concerned with user stress and affect.