With the rapidly increasing number of satellites in space and their enhanced capabilities, the amount of earth observation images collected by satellites is exceeding the transmission limits of satellite-to-ground links. Although existing learned image compression solutions achieve remarkable performance by using a sophisticated encoder to extract fruitful features as compression and using a decoder to reconstruct. It is still hard to directly deploy those complex encoders on current satellites' embedded GPUs with limited computing capability and power supply to compress images in orbit. In this paper, we propose COSMIC, a simple yet effective learned compression solution to transmit satellite images. We first design a lightweight encoder (i.e. reducing FLOPs by 2.5~5X) on satellite to achieve a high image compression ratio to save satellite-to-ground links. Then, for reconstructions on the ground, to deal with the feature extraction ability degradation due to simplifying encoders, we propose a diffusion-based model to compensate image details when decoding. Our insight is that satellite's earth observation photos are not just images but indeed multi-modal data with a nature of Text-to-Image pairing since they are collected with rich sensor data (e.g. coordinates, timestep, etc.) that can be used as the condition for diffusion generation. Extensive experiments show that COSMIC outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both perceptual and distortion metrics.

Deep learning (DL) based perception models have enabled the possibility of current autonomous driving systems (ADS). However, various studies have pointed out that the DL models inside the ADS perception modules are vulnerable to adversarial attacks which can easily manipulate these DL models’ predictions. In this paper, we propose a more practical adversarial attack against the ADS perception module. Particularly, instead of targeting one of the DL models inside the ADS perception module, we propose to use one universal patch to mislead multiple DL models inside the ADS perception module simultaneously which leads to a higher chance of system-wide malfunction. We achieve such a goal by attacking the attention of DL models as a higher level of feature representation rather than traditional gradient-based attacks. We successfully generate a universal patch containing malicious perturbations that can attract multiple victim DL models’ attention to further induce their prediction errors. We verify our attack with extensive experiments on a typical ADS perception module structure with five famous datasets and also physical world scenes1.1We release our code at https://github.com/qingjiesjtu/ATTA

Many real-world structured prediction problems need machine learning to capture data distribution and constraint reasoning to ensure structure validity. Nevertheless, constrained structured prediction is still limited in real-world applications because of the lack of tools to bridge constraint satisfaction and machine learning. In this paper, we propose COnstraint REasoning embedded Structured Prediction (Core-Sp), a scalable constraint reasoning and machine learning integrated approach for learning over structured domains. We propose to embed decision diagrams, a popular constraint reasoning tool, as a fully-differentiable module into deep neural networks for structured prediction. We also propose an iterative search algorithm to automate the searching process of the best Core-Sp structure. We evaluate Core-Sp on three applications: vehicle dispatching service planning, if-then program synthesis, and text2SQL generation. The proposed Core-Sp module demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art approaches in all three applications. The structures generated with Core-Sp satisfy 100% of the constraints when using exact decision diagrams. In addition, Core-Sp boosts learning performance by reducing the modeling space via constraint satisfaction.

Qinyuan Ye, Liyuan Liu, Maosen Zhang, Xiang Ren. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.

Clos‐network switches have attracted a lot of attention because of their modularity and scalability. However, out‐of‐sequence problems weigh heavily against the application of buffered Clos‐network switches. A space‐memory‐memory (SMM) Clos‐network switch is proposed in this study which is able to provide in‐sequence service. There are two features in the proposed switch which are different from the previously proposed schemes. First, two‐stage load‐balanced Birkhoff‐von Neumann (LB‐BvN) switches are adopted for each second‐stage module. Second, no inter‐stage matching is needed. The key idea to provide in‐order cell delivery in the proposed SMM Clos‐network switch is that cells belonging to the same flow will experience the identical delay when passing through the LB‐BvN switches at the second stage, and arrive at their destined third‐stage module in order. Each switching module operates independently, which makes the proposed SMM Clos‐network switch practical to implement in hardware. Simulations show that the proposed switch can achieve high performance under both Bernoulli and Bursty arrival traffic.