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This paper examines the challenges and advancements in recognizing seals within their natural habitats using conventional photography, underscored by the emergence of machine learning technologies. We used the leopard seal, \emph{Hydrurga leptonyx}, a key species within Antarctic ecosystems, to review the different available methods found. As apex predators, Leopard seals are characterized by their significant ecological role and elusive nature so studying them is crucial to understand the health of their ecosystem. Traditional methods of monitoring seal species are often constrained by the labor-intensive and time-consuming processes required for collecting data, compounded by the limited insights these methods provide. The advent of machine learning, particularly through the application of vision transformers, heralds a new era of efficiency and precision in species monitoring. By leveraging state-of-the-art approaches in detection, segmentation, and recognition within digital imaging, this paper presents a synthesis of the current landscape, highlighting both the cutting-edge methodologies and the predominant challenges faced in accurately identifying seals through photographic data., Comment: 28th International Conference on Image Processing, Computer Vision, & Pattern Recognition (IPCV'24), Las Vegas, USA

Multimodal machine learning models that combine visual and textual data are increasingly being deployed in critical applications, raising significant safety and security concerns due to their vulnerability to adversarial attacks. This paper presents an effective strategy to enhance the robustness of multimodal image captioning models against such attacks. By leveraging the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) to generate adversarial examples and incorporating adversarial training techniques, we demonstrate improved model robustness on two benchmark datasets: Flickr8k and COCO. Our findings indicate that selectively training only the text decoder of the multimodal architecture shows performance comparable to full adversarial training while offering increased computational efficiency. This targeted approach suggests a balance between robustness and training costs, facilitating the ethical deployment of multimodal AI systems across various domains., Comment: Accepted into KDD 2024 workshop on Ethical AI

Grading SQL queries can be a time-consuming, tedious and challenging task, especially as the number of student submissions increases. Several systems have been introduced in an attempt to mitigate these challenges, but those systems have their own limitations. This paper describes our novel approach to automating the process of grading SQL queries. Unlike previous approaches, we employ a unique convolutional neural network architecture that employs a parameter-sharing approach for different machine learning tasks that enables the architecture to induce different knowledge representations of the data to increase its potential for understanding SQL statements., Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, paper accepted at "The 18th International Conference on Frontiers in Education: Computer Science and Computer Engineering"

Research in neural models inspired by mammal's visual cortex has led to many spiking neural networks such as pulse-coupled neural networks (PCNNs). These models are oscillating, spatio-temporal models stimulated with images to produce several time-based responses. This paper reviews PCNN's state of the art, covering its mathematical formulation, variants, and other simplifications found in the literature. We present several applications in which PCNN architectures have successfully addressed some fundamental image processing and computer vision challenges, including image segmentation, edge detection, medical imaging, image fusion, image compression, object recognition, and remote sensing. Results achieved in these applications suggest that the PCNN architecture generates useful perceptual information relevant to a wide variety of computer vision tasks., Comment: The 25th International Conference on Image Processing, Computer Vision, and Pattern Recognition (IPCV 2021)

Concerns regarding the propensity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce inaccurate outputs, also known as hallucinations, have escalated. Detecting them is vital for ensuring the reliability of applications relying on LLM-generated content. Current methods often demand substantial resources and rely on extensive LLMs or employ supervised learning with multidimensional features or intricate linguistic and semantic analyses difficult to reproduce and largely depend on using the same LLM that hallucinated. This paper introduces a supervised learning approach employing two simple classifiers utilizing only four numerical features derived from tokens and vocabulary probabilities obtained from other LLM evaluators, which are not necessarily the same. The method yields promising results, surpassing state-of-the-art outcomes in multiple tasks across three different benchmarks. Additionally, we provide a comprehensive examination of the strengths and weaknesses of our approach, highlighting the significance of the features utilized and the LLM employed as an evaluator. We have released our code publicly at https://github.com/Baylor-AI/HalluDetect., Comment: ICAI'24 - The 26th Int'l Conf on Artificial Intelligence

This study presents the development and evaluation of a ByT5-based multilingual translation model tailored for translating the Bible into underrepresented languages. Utilizing the comprehensive Johns Hopkins University Bible Corpus, we trained the model to capture the intricate nuances of character-based and morphologically rich languages. Our results, measured by the BLEU score and supplemented with sample translations, suggest the model can improve accessibility to sacred texts. It effectively handles the distinctive biblical lexicon and structure, thus bridging the linguistic divide. The study also discusses the model's limitations and suggests pathways for future enhancements, focusing on expanding access to sacred literature across linguistic boundaries., Comment: LXAI Workshop at the 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2024)

Our study addresses the challenges of building datasets to understand the risks associated with organized activities and human trafficking through commercial sex advertisements. These challenges include data scarcity, rapid obsolescence, and privacy concerns. Traditional approaches, which are not automated and are difficult to reproduce, fall short in addressing these issues. We have developed a reproducible and automated methodology to analyze five million advertisements. In the process, we identified further challenges in dataset creation within this sensitive domain. This paper presents a streamlined methodology to assist researchers in constructing effective datasets for combating organized crime, allowing them to focus on advancing detection technologies., Comment: LXAI Workshop at the 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2024)

Recently, with the advancement of deep learning, several applications in text classification have advanced significantly. However, this improvement comes with a cost because deep learning is vulnerable to adversarial examples. This weakness indicates that deep learning is not very robust. Fortunately, the input of a text classifier is discrete. Hence, it can prevent the classifier from state-of-the-art attacks. Nonetheless, previous works have generated black-box attacks that successfully manipulate the discrete values of the input to find adversarial examples. Therefore, instead of changing the discrete values, we transform the input into its embedding vector containing real values to perform the state-of-the-art white-box attacks. Then, we convert the perturbed embedding vector back into a text and name it an adversarial example. In summary, we create a framework that measures the robustness of a text classifier by using the gradients of the classifier., Comment: 7 pages

The efficacy of deep learning models has been called into question by the presence of adversarial examples. Addressing the vulnerability of deep learning models to adversarial examples is crucial for ensuring their continued development and deployment. In this work, we focus on the role of rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation functions in the generation of adversarial examples. ReLU functions are commonly used in deep learning models because they facilitate the training process. However, our empirical analysis demonstrates that ReLU functions are not robust against adversarial examples. We propose a modified version of the ReLU function, which improves robustness against adversarial examples. Our results are supported by an experiment, which confirms the effectiveness of our proposed modification. Additionally, we demonstrate that applying adversarial training to our customized model further enhances its robustness compared to a general model., Comment: 10 pages

Dust storms are associated with certain respiratory illnesses across different areas in the world. Researchers have devoted time and resources to study the elements surrounding dust storm phenomena. This paper reviews the efforts of those who have investigated dust aerosols using sensors onboard of satellites using machine learning-based approaches. We have reviewed the most common issues revolving dust aerosol modeling using different datasets and different sensors from a historical perspective. Our findings suggest that multi-spectral approaches based on linear and non-linear combinations of spectral bands are some of the most successful for visualization and quantitative analysis; however, when researchers have leveraged machine learning, performance has been improved and new opportunities to solve unique problems arise., Comment: The 23rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ICAI 2021)

Quantum Computing in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era has shown promising applications in machine learning, optimization, and cryptography. Despite the progress, challenges persist due to system noise, errors, and decoherence that complicate the simulation of quantum systems. The depolarization channel is a standard tool for simulating a quantum system's noise. However, modeling such noise for practical applications is computationally expensive when we have limited hardware resources, as is the case in the NISQ era. We propose a modified representation for a single-qubit depolarization channel with two Kraus operators based only on X and Z Pauli matrices. Our approach reduces the computational complexity from six to four matrix multiplications per execution of a channel. Experiments on a Quantum Machine Learning (QML) model on the Iris dataset across various circuit depths and depolarization rates validate that our approach maintains the model's accuracy while improving efficiency. This simplified noise model enables more scalable simulations of quantum circuits under depolarization, advancing capabilities in the NISQ era.

This project tackles the pressing issue of human trafficking in online C2C marketplaces through advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. We introduce a novel methodology for generating pseudo-labeled datasets with minimal supervision, serving as a rich resource for training state-of-the-art NLP models. Focusing on tasks like Human Trafficking Risk Prediction (HTRP) and Organized Activity Detection (OAD), we employ cutting-edge Transformer models for analysis. A key contribution is the implementation of an interpretability framework using Integrated Gradients, providing explainable insights crucial for law enforcement. This work not only fills a critical gap in the literature but also offers a scalable, machine learning-driven approach to combat human exploitation online. It serves as a foundation for future research and practical applications, emphasizing the role of machine learning in addressing complex social issues.