484 research outputs found
Mobile Device Background Sensors: Authentication vs Privacy
The increasing number of mobile devices in recent years has caused the collection of a large amount of personal information that needs to be protected. To this aim, behavioural biometrics has become very popular. But, what is the discriminative power of mobile behavioural biometrics in real scenarios? With the success of Deep Learning (DL), architectures based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), have shown improvements compared to traditional machine learning methods. However, these DL architectures still have limitations that need to be addressed. In response, new DL architectures like Transformers have emerged. The question is, can these new Transformers outperform previous biometric approaches? To answers to these questions, this thesis focuses on behavioural biometric authentication with data acquired from mobile background sensors (i.e., accelerometers and gyroscopes). In addition, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first thesis that explores and proposes novel behavioural biometric systems based on Transformers, achieving state-of-the-art results in gait, swipe, and keystroke biometrics. The adoption of biometrics requires a balance between security and privacy. Biometric modalities provide a unique and inherently personal approach for authentication. Nevertheless, biometrics also give rise to concerns regarding the invasion of personal privacy. According to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduced by the European Union, personal data such as biometric data are sensitive and must be used and protected properly. This thesis analyses the impact of sensitive data in the performance of biometric systems and proposes a novel unsupervised privacy-preserving approach. The research conducted in this thesis makes significant contributions, including: i) a comprehensive review of the privacy vulnerabilities of mobile device sensors, covering metrics for quantifying privacy in relation to sensitive data, along with protection methods for safeguarding sensitive information; ii) an analysis of authentication systems for behavioural biometrics on mobile devices (i.e., gait, swipe, and keystroke), being the first thesis that explores the potential of Transformers for behavioural biometrics, introducing novel architectures that outperform the state of the art; and iii) a novel privacy-preserving approach for mobile biometric gait verification using unsupervised learning techniques, ensuring the protection of sensitive data during the verification process
Improving Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Event Detection
The widespread adoption of applications powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) backbones has unquestionably changed the way we interact with the world around us. Applications such as automated personal assistants, automatic question answering, and machine-based translation systems have become mainstays of modern culture thanks to the recent considerable advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research. Nonetheless, with over 7000 spoken languages in the world, there still remain a considerable number of marginalized communities that are unable to benefit from these technological advancements largely due to the language they speak. Cross-Lingual Learning (CLL) looks to address this issue by transferring the knowledge acquired from a popular, high-resource source language (e.g., English, Chinese, or Spanish) to a less favored, lower-resourced target language (e.g., Urdu or Swahili). This dissertation leverages the Event Detection (ED) sub-task of Information Extraction (IE) as a testbed and presents three novel approaches that improve cross-lingual transfer learning from distinct perspectives: (1) direct knowledge transfer, (2) hybrid knowledge transfer, and (3) few-shot learning
Exploiting Unlabelled Photos for Stronger Fine-Grained SBIR
This paper advances the fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR)
literature by putting forward a strong baseline that overshoots prior
state-of-the-arts by ~11%. This is not via complicated design though, but by
addressing two critical issues facing the community (i) the gold standard
triplet loss does not enforce holistic latent space geometry, and (ii) there
are never enough sketches to train a high accuracy model. For the former, we
propose a simple modification to the standard triplet loss, that explicitly
enforces separation amongst photos/sketch instances. For the latter, we put
forward a novel knowledge distillation module can leverage photo data for model
training. Both modules are then plugged into a novel plug-n-playable training
paradigm that allows for more stable training. More specifically, for (i) we
employ an intra-modal triplet loss amongst sketches to bring sketches of the
same instance closer from others, and one more amongst photos to push away
different photo instances while bringing closer a structurally augmented
version of the same photo (offering a gain of ~4-6%). To tackle (ii), we first
pre-train a teacher on the large set of unlabelled photos over the
aforementioned intra-modal photo triplet loss. Then we distill the contextual
similarity present amongst the instances in the teacher's embedding space to
that in the student's embedding space, by matching the distribution over
inter-feature distances of respective samples in both embedding spaces
(delivering a further gain of ~4-5%). Apart from outperforming prior arts
significantly, our model also yields satisfactory results on generalising to
new classes. Project page: https://aneeshan95.github.io/Sketch_PVT/Comment: Accepted in CVPR 2023. Project page available at
https://aneeshan95.github.io/Sketch_PVT
Sounding Video Generator: A Unified Framework for Text-guided Sounding Video Generation
As a combination of visual and audio signals, video is inherently
multi-modal. However, existing video generation methods are primarily intended
for the synthesis of visual frames, whereas audio signals in realistic videos
are disregarded. In this work, we concentrate on a rarely investigated problem
of text guided sounding video generation and propose the Sounding Video
Generator (SVG), a unified framework for generating realistic videos along with
audio signals. Specifically, we present the SVG-VQGAN to transform visual
frames and audio melspectrograms into discrete tokens. SVG-VQGAN applies a
novel hybrid contrastive learning method to model inter-modal and intra-modal
consistency and improve the quantized representations. A cross-modal attention
module is employed to extract associated features of visual frames and audio
signals for contrastive learning. Then, a Transformer-based decoder is used to
model associations between texts, visual frames, and audio signals at token
level for auto-regressive sounding video generation. AudioSetCap, a human
annotated text-video-audio paired dataset, is produced for training SVG.
Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method when compared
with existing textto-video generation methods as well as audio generation
methods on Kinetics and VAS datasets
Deep Lifelong Cross-modal Hashing
Hashing methods have made significant progress in cross-modal retrieval tasks
with fast query speed and low storage cost. Among them, deep learning-based
hashing achieves better performance on large-scale data due to its excellent
extraction and representation ability for nonlinear heterogeneous features.
However, there are still two main challenges in catastrophic forgetting when
data with new categories arrive continuously, and time-consuming for
non-continuous hashing retrieval to retrain for updating. To this end, we, in
this paper, propose a novel deep lifelong cross-modal hashing to achieve
lifelong hashing retrieval instead of re-training hash function repeatedly when
new data arrive. Specifically, we design lifelong learning strategy to update
hash functions by directly training the incremental data instead of retraining
new hash functions using all the accumulated data, which significantly reduce
training time. Then, we propose lifelong hashing loss to enable original hash
codes participate in lifelong learning but remain invariant, and further
preserve the similarity and dis-similarity among original and incremental hash
codes to maintain performance. Additionally, considering distribution
heterogeneity when new data arriving continuously, we introduce multi-label
semantic similarity to supervise hash learning, and it has been proven that the
similarity improves performance with detailed analysis. Experimental results on
benchmark datasets show that the proposed methods achieves comparative
performance comparing with recent state-of-the-art cross-modal hashing methods,
and it yields substantial average increments over 20\% in retrieval accuracy
and almost reduces over 80\% training time when new data arrives continuously
La traduzione specializzata all’opera per una piccola impresa in espansione: la mia esperienza di internazionalizzazione in cinese di Bioretics© S.r.l.
Global markets are currently immersed in two all-encompassing and unstoppable processes: internationalization and globalization. While the former pushes companies to look beyond the borders of their country of origin to forge relationships with foreign trading partners, the latter fosters the standardization in all countries, by reducing spatiotemporal distances and breaking down geographical, political, economic and socio-cultural barriers. In recent decades, another domain has appeared to propel these unifying drives: Artificial Intelligence, together with its high technologies aiming to implement human cognitive abilities in machinery. The “Language Toolkit – Le lingue straniere al servizio dell’internazionalizzazione dell’impresa” project, promoted by the Department of Interpreting and Translation (Forlì Campus) in collaboration with the Romagna Chamber of Commerce (Forlì-Cesena and Rimini), seeks to help Italian SMEs make their way into the global market. It is precisely within this project that this dissertation has been conceived. Indeed, its purpose is to present the translation and localization project from English into Chinese of a series of texts produced by Bioretics© S.r.l.: an investor deck, the company website and part of the installation and use manual of the Aliquis© framework software, its flagship product. This dissertation is structured as follows: Chapter 1 presents the project and the company in detail; Chapter 2 outlines the internationalization and globalization processes and the Artificial Intelligence market both in Italy and in China; Chapter 3 provides the theoretical foundations for every aspect related to Specialized Translation, including website localization; Chapter 4 describes the resources and tools used to perform the translations; Chapter 5 proposes an analysis of the source texts; Chapter 6 is a commentary on translation strategies and choices
Seamless Multimodal Biometrics for Continuous Personalised Wellbeing Monitoring
Artificially intelligent perception is increasingly present in the lives of
every one of us. Vehicles are no exception, (...) In the near future, pattern
recognition will have an even stronger role in vehicles, as self-driving cars
will require automated ways to understand what is happening around (and within)
them and act accordingly. (...) This doctoral work focused on advancing
in-vehicle sensing through the research of novel computer vision and pattern
recognition methodologies for both biometrics and wellbeing monitoring. The
main focus has been on electrocardiogram (ECG) biometrics, a trait well-known
for its potential for seamless driver monitoring. Major efforts were devoted to
achieving improved performance in identification and identity verification in
off-the-person scenarios, well-known for increased noise and variability. Here,
end-to-end deep learning ECG biometric solutions were proposed and important
topics were addressed such as cross-database and long-term performance,
waveform relevance through explainability, and interlead conversion. Face
biometrics, a natural complement to the ECG in seamless unconstrained
scenarios, was also studied in this work. The open challenges of masked face
recognition and interpretability in biometrics were tackled in an effort to
evolve towards algorithms that are more transparent, trustworthy, and robust to
significant occlusions. Within the topic of wellbeing monitoring, improved
solutions to multimodal emotion recognition in groups of people and
activity/violence recognition in in-vehicle scenarios were proposed. At last,
we also proposed a novel way to learn template security within end-to-end
models, dismissing additional separate encryption processes, and a
self-supervised learning approach tailored to sequential data, in order to
ensure data security and optimal performance. (...)Comment: Doctoral thesis presented and approved on the 21st of December 2022
to the University of Port
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