Recent research has shown that deep neural networks can be compromised through data-poisoning-based backdoor attacks, in which a small fraction of samples in the training dataset is maliciously modified following certain patterns for the purpose of influencing the behavior of the resultant model. Previous attack techniques generate these malicious samples by randomly picking clean data from the training dataset and incorporating a triggering mechanism. This paper introduces a Salience-based Poisoning Selection Strategy (SPSS) that significantly improves attack effectiveness by selecting diverse samples with salient features as victims for poisoning. Rigorous experimental testing on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet10 reveals that SPSS significantly improves the attacking effectiveness. Under SPSS selection, the number of poisoned images needed to achieve a certain attack success rate can be minimized by 38.44% of that under random selection approach. Our method is also more computationally efficient compared with existing SOTA selection strategies in this field.

This paper targets unsupervised skeleton-based action representation learning and proposes a new Hierarchical Contrast (HiCo) framework. Different from the existing contrastive-based solutions that typically represent an input skeleton sequence into instance-level features and perform contrast holistically, our proposed HiCo represents the input into multiple-level features and performs contrast in a hierarchical manner. Specifically, given a human skeleton sequence, we represent it into multiple feature vectors of different granularities from both temporal and spatial domains via sequence-to-sequence (S2S) encoders and unified downsampling modules. Besides, the hierarchical contrast is conducted in terms of four levels: instance level, domain level, clip level, and part level. Moreover, HiCo is orthogonal to the S2S encoder, which allows us to flexibly embrace state-of-the-art S2S encoders. Extensive experiments on four datasets, i.e., NTU-60, NTU-120, PKU-I and PKU-II, show that HiCo achieves a new state-of-the-art for unsupervised skeleton-based action representation learning in two downstream tasks including action recognition and retrieval, and its learned action representation is of good transferability. Besides, we also show that our framework is effective for semi-supervised skeleton-based action recognition. Our code is available at https://github.com/HuiGuanLab/HiCo.

Unsupervised pre-training has shown great success in skeleton-based action understanding recently. Existing works typically train separate modality-specific models (i.e., joint, bone, and motion), then integrate the multi-modal information for action understanding by a late-fusion strategy. Although these approaches have achieved significant performance, they suffer from the complex yet redundant multi-stream model designs, each of which is also limited to the fixed input skeleton modality. To alleviate these issues, in this paper, we propose a Unified Multimodal Unsupervised Representation Learning framework, called UmURL, which exploits an efficient early-fusion strategy to jointly encode the multi-modal features in a single-stream manner. Specifically, instead of designing separate modality-specific optimization processes for uni-modal unsupervised learning, we feed different modality inputs into the same stream with an early-fusion strategy to learn their multi-modal features for reducing model complexity. To ensure that the fused multi-modal features do not exhibit modality bias, i.e., being dominated by a certain modality input, we further propose both intra- and inter-modal consistency learning to guarantee that the multi-modal features contain the complete semantics of each modal via feature decomposition and distinct alignment. In this manner, our framework is able to learn the unified representations of uni-modal or multi-modal skeleton input, which is flexible to different kinds of modality input for robust action understanding in practical cases. Extensive experiments conducted on three large-scale datasets, i.e., NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-MMD II, demonstrate that UmURL is highly efficient, possessing the approximate complexity with the uni-modal methods, while achieving new state-of-the-art performance across various downstream task scenarios in skeleton-based action representation learning. Our source code is available at https://github.com/HuiGuanLab/UmURL.