Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Xiao Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Xiao Yang.

At least 163 records · Page 9Linked to original sources

The RoboDrive Challenge: Drive Anytime Anywhere in Any Condition

In the realm of autonomous driving, robust perception under out-of-distribution conditions is paramount for the safe deployment of vehicles. Challenges such as adverse weather, sensor malfunctions, and environmental unpredictability can severely impact the performance of autonomous systems. The 2024 RoboDrive Challenge was crafted to propel the development of driving perception technologies that can withstand and adapt to these real-world variabilities. Focusing on four pivotal tasks -- BEV detection, map segmentation, semantic occupancy prediction, and multi-view depth estimation -- the competition laid down a gauntlet to innovate and enhance system resilience against typical and atypical disturbances. This year's challenge consisted of five distinct tracks and attracted 140 registered teams from 93 institutes across 11 countries, resulting in nearly one thousand submissions evaluated through our servers. The competition culminated in 15 top-performing solutions, which introduced a range of innovative approaches including advanced data augmentation, multi-sensor fusion, self-supervised learning for error correction, and new algorithmic strategies to enhance sensor robustness. These contributions significantly advanced the state of the art, particularly in handling sensor inconsistencies and environmental variability. Participants, through collaborative efforts, pushed the boundaries of current technologies, showcasing their potential in real-world scenarios. Extensive evaluations and analyses provided insights into the effectiveness of these solutions, highlighting key trends and successful strategies for improving the resilience of driving perception systems. This challenge has set a new benchmark in the field, providing a rich repository of techniques expected to guide future research in this field.

cs.CV↗

AutoBreach: Universal and Adaptive Jailbreaking with Efficient Wordplay-Guided Optimization

Despite the widespread application of large language models (LLMs) across various tasks, recent studies indicate that they are susceptible to jailbreak attacks, which can render their defense mechanisms ineffective. However, previous jailbreak research has frequently been constrained by limited universality, suboptimal efficiency, and a reliance on manual crafting. In response, we rethink the approach to jailbreaking LLMs and formally define three essential properties from the attacker' s perspective, which contributes to guiding the design of jailbreak methods. We further introduce AutoBreach, a novel method for jailbreaking LLMs that requires only black-box access. Inspired by the versatility of wordplay, AutoBreach employs a wordplay-guided mapping rule sampling strategy to generate a variety of universal mapping rules for creating adversarial prompts. This generation process leverages LLMs' automatic summarization and reasoning capabilities, thus alleviating the manual burden. To boost jailbreak success rates, we further suggest sentence compression and chain-of-thought-based mapping rules to correct errors and wordplay misinterpretations in target LLMs. Additionally, we propose a two-stage mapping rule optimization strategy that initially optimizes mapping rules before querying target LLMs to enhance the efficiency of AutoBreach. AutoBreach can efficiently identify security vulnerabilities across various LLMs, including three proprietary models: Claude-3, GPT-3.5, GPT-4 Turbo, and two LLMs' web platforms: Bingchat, GPT-4 Web, achieving an average success rate of over 80% with fewer than 10 queries

cs.CV↗

Correction for the Weakening Magnetic Field within the Sunspot Umbra Observed by ASO-S/FMG

The magnetic field inside the sunspot umbra, as observed by the Full-disk MagnetoGraph (FMG) onboard the Advanced Space based Solar Observatory (ASO-S), was found to be experiencing a weakening. To address this issue, we employed a method developed by Xu et al. (2021) to correct the weakening in the data of 20 active regions observed by FMG during the period spanning December 29, 2022, to July 23, 2023. Research has revealed that the onset of magnetic field weakening occurs at a minimum magnetic field strength of 705 G, with the peak strength reaching up to 1931 G. We computed the change ratio (R1) of the unsigned magnetic flux within the sunspot umbra, considering measurements both before and after correction. The change ratio (R1) spans from 26% to 124%, indicating a significant increase in the unsigned magnetic flux within sunspot umbrae observed by FMG after correction. To illustrate this, we selected four active regions for comparison with data from the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI). After correction, it is found that the unsigned magnetic flux in sunspot umbrae measured by FMG aligns more closely with that of HMI. This supports the effectiveness of the corrective method for FMG, despite imperfections, particularly at the umbra-penumbra boundary.

astro-ph.SR↗

Efficient Black-box Adversarial Attacks via Bayesian Optimization Guided by a Function Prior

This paper studies the challenging black-box adversarial attack that aims to generate adversarial examples against a black-box model by only using output feedback of the model to input queries. Some previous methods improve the query efficiency by incorporating the gradient of a surrogate white-box model into query-based attacks due to the adversarial transferability. However, the localized gradient is not informative enough, making these methods still query-intensive. In this paper, we propose a Prior-guided Bayesian Optimization (P-BO) algorithm that leverages the surrogate model as a global function prior in black-box adversarial attacks. As the surrogate model contains rich prior information of the black-box one, P-BO models the attack objective with a Gaussian process whose mean function is initialized as the surrogate model's loss. Our theoretical analysis on the regret bound indicates that the performance of P-BO may be affected by a bad prior. Therefore, we further propose an adaptive integration strategy to automatically adjust a coefficient on the function prior by minimizing the regret bound. Extensive experiments on image classifiers and large vision-language models demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm in reducing queries and improving attack success rates compared with the state-of-the-art black-box attacks. Code is available at https://github.com/yibo-miao/PBO-Attack.

cs.LG↗

Observation of a large-scale filament eruption initiated by two small-scale erupting filaments pushing out from below

Filament eruptions often result in flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Most studies attribute the filament eruptions to their instabilities or magnetic reconnection. In this study, we report a unique observation of a filament eruption whose initiation process has not been reported before. This large-scale filament, with a length of about 360 Mm crossing an active region, is forced to erupted by two small-scale erupting filaments pushing out from below. This process of multi-filament eruption results in an M6.4 flare in the active region NOAA 13229 on 25th February 2023. The whole process can be divided into three stages: the eruptions of two active-region filaments F1 and F2; the interactions between the erupting F1, F2, and the large-scale filament F3; and the eruption of F3. Though this multi-filament eruption occurs near the northwest limb of the solar disk, it produces a strong halo CME that causes a significant geomagnetic disturbance. Our observations present a new filament eruption mechanism, in which the initial kinetic energy of the eruption is obtained from and transported to by other erupting structures. This event provides us a unique insight into the dynamics of multi-filament eruptions and their corresponding effects on the interplanetary space.

astro-ph.SR↗

Robust Classification via a Single Diffusion Model

Diffusion models have been applied to improve adversarial robustness of image classifiers by purifying the adversarial noises or generating realistic data for adversarial training. However, diffusion-based purification can be evaded by stronger adaptive attacks while adversarial training does not perform well under unseen threats, exhibiting inevitable limitations of these methods. To better harness the expressive power of diffusion models, this paper proposes Robust Diffusion Classifier (RDC), a generative classifier that is constructed from a pre-trained diffusion model to be adversarially robust. RDC first maximizes the data likelihood of a given input and then predicts the class probabilities of the optimized input using the conditional likelihood estimated by the diffusion model through Bayes' theorem. To further reduce the computational cost, we propose a new diffusion backbone called multi-head diffusion and develop efficient sampling strategies. As RDC does not require training on particular adversarial attacks, we demonstrate that it is more generalizable to defend against multiple unseen threats. In particular, RDC achieves $75.67\%$ robust accuracy against various $\ell_\infty$ norm-bounded adaptive attacks with $ε_\infty=8/255$ on CIFAR-10, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art adversarial training models by $+4.77\%$. The results highlight the potential of generative classifiers by employing pre-trained diffusion models for adversarial robustness compared with the commonly studied discriminative classifiers. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/huanranchen/DiffusionClassifier}.

cs.CV↗

MagicPose: Realistic Human Poses and Facial Expressions Retargeting with Identity-aware Diffusion

In this work, we propose MagicPose, a diffusion-based model for 2D human pose and facial expression retargeting. Specifically, given a reference image, we aim to generate a person's new images by controlling the poses and facial expressions while keeping the identity unchanged. To this end, we propose a two-stage training strategy to disentangle human motions and appearance (e.g., facial expressions, skin tone and dressing), consisting of (1) the pre-training of an appearance-control block and (2) learning appearance-disentangled pose control. Our novel design enables robust appearance control over generated human images, including body, facial attributes, and even background. By leveraging the prior knowledge of image diffusion models, MagicPose generalizes well to unseen human identities and complex poses without the need for additional fine-tuning. Moreover, the proposed model is easy to use and can be considered as a plug-in module/extension to Stable Diffusion. The code is available at: https://github.com/Boese0601/MagicDance

cs.CV↗

MVDream: Multi-view Diffusion for 3D Generation

We introduce MVDream, a diffusion model that is able to generate consistent multi-view images from a given text prompt. Learning from both 2D and 3D data, a multi-view diffusion model can achieve the generalizability of 2D diffusion models and the consistency of 3D renderings. We demonstrate that such a multi-view diffusion model is implicitly a generalizable 3D prior agnostic to 3D representations. It can be applied to 3D generation via Score Distillation Sampling, significantly enhancing the consistency and stability of existing 2D-lifting methods. It can also learn new concepts from a few 2D examples, akin to DreamBooth, but for 3D generation.

cs.CV↗

MoMA: Multimodal LLM Adapter for Fast Personalized Image Generation

In this paper, we present MoMA: an open-vocabulary, training-free personalized image model that boasts flexible zero-shot capabilities. As foundational text-to-image models rapidly evolve, the demand for robust image-to-image translation grows. Addressing this need, MoMA specializes in subject-driven personalized image generation. Utilizing an open-source, Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM), we train MoMA to serve a dual role as both a feature extractor and a generator. This approach effectively synergizes reference image and text prompt information to produce valuable image features, facilitating an image diffusion model. To better leverage the generated features, we further introduce a novel self-attention shortcut method that efficiently transfers image features to an image diffusion model, improving the resemblance of the target object in generated images. Remarkably, as a tuning-free plug-and-play module, our model requires only a single reference image and outperforms existing methods in generating images with high detail fidelity, enhanced identity-preservation and prompt faithfulness. Our work is open-source, thereby providing universal access to these advancements.

cs.CV↗

Embodied Active Defense: Leveraging Recurrent Feedback to Counter Adversarial Patches

The vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial patches has motivated numerous defense strategies for boosting model robustness. However, the prevailing defenses depend on single observation or pre-established adversary information to counter adversarial patches, often failing to be confronted with unseen or adaptive adversarial attacks and easily exhibiting unsatisfying performance in dynamic 3D environments. Inspired by active human perception and recurrent feedback mechanisms, we develop Embodied Active Defense (EAD), a proactive defensive strategy that actively contextualizes environmental information to address misaligned adversarial patches in 3D real-world settings. To achieve this, EAD develops two central recurrent sub-modules, i.e., a perception module and a policy module, to implement two critical functions of active vision. These models recurrently process a series of beliefs and observations, facilitating progressive refinement of their comprehension of the target object and enabling the development of strategic actions to counter adversarial patches in 3D environments. To optimize learning efficiency, we incorporate a differentiable approximation of environmental dynamics and deploy patches that are agnostic to the adversary strategies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EAD substantially enhances robustness against a variety of patches within just a few steps through its action policy in safety-critical tasks (e.g., face recognition and object detection), without compromising standard accuracy. Furthermore, due to the attack-agnostic characteristic, EAD facilitates excellent generalization to unseen attacks, diminishing the averaged attack success rate by 95 percent across a range of unseen adversarial attacks.

cs.CV↗

Unleashing the Power of Self-Supervised Image Denoising: A Comprehensive Review

The advent of deep learning has brought a revolutionary transformation to image denoising techniques. However, the persistent challenge of acquiring noise-clean pairs for supervised methods in real-world scenarios remains formidable, necessitating the exploration of more practical self-supervised image denoising. This paper focuses on self-supervised image denoising methods that offer effective solutions to address this challenge. Our comprehensive review thoroughly analyzes the latest advancements in self-supervised image denoising approaches, categorizing them into three distinct classes: General methods, Blind Spot Network (BSN)-based methods, and Transformer-based methods. For each class, we provide a concise theoretical analysis along with their practical applications. To assess the effectiveness of these methods, we present both quantitative and qualitative experimental results on various datasets, utilizing classical algorithms as benchmarks. Additionally, we critically discuss the current limitations of these methods and propose promising directions for future research. By offering a detailed overview of recent developments in self-supervised image denoising, this review serves as an invaluable resource for researchers and practitioners in the field, facilitating a deeper understanding of this emerging domain and inspiring further advancements.

eess.IV↗

AnimateDiff-Lightning: Cross-Model Diffusion Distillation

We present AnimateDiff-Lightning for lightning-fast video generation. Our model uses progressive adversarial diffusion distillation to achieve new state-of-the-art in few-step video generation. We discuss our modifications to adapt it for the video modality. Furthermore, we propose to simultaneously distill the probability flow of multiple base diffusion models, resulting in a single distilled motion module with broader style compatibility. We are pleased to release our distilled AnimateDiff-Lightning model for the community's use.

cs.CV↗

Pixel detector hybridization and integration with anisotropic conductive adhesives

A reliable and cost-effective interconnect technology is required for the development of hybrid pixel detectors. The interconnect technology needs to be adapted for the pitch and die sizes of the respective applications. For small-scale applications and during the ASIC and sensor development phase, interconnect technologies must also be suitable for the assembly of single-dies typically available from Multi-Project-Wafer submissions. Within the CERN EP R&D program and the AIDAinnova collaboration, innovative and scalable hybridization concepts are under development for pixel-detector applications in future colliders. This contribution presents recent results of a newly developed in-house single-die interconnection process based on Anisotropic Conductive Adhesives (ACA). The ACA interconnect technology replaces solder bumps with conductive micro-particles embedded in an epoxy layer applied as either film or paste. The electro-mechanical connection between the sensor and ASIC is achieved via thermocompression of the ACA using a flip-chip device bonder. A specific pixel-pad topology is required to enable the connection via micro-particles and create cavities into which excess epoxy can flow. This pixel-pad topology is achieved with an in-house Electroless Nickel Immersion Gold process that is also under development within the project. The ENIG and ACA processes are qualified with a variety of different ASICs, sensors, and dedicated test structures, with pad diameters ranging from 12 μm to 140 μm and pitches between 20 μm and 1.3 mm. The produced assemblies are characterized electrically, with radioactive-source exposures, and in tests with high-momentum particle beams. A focus is placed on recent optimization of the plating and interconnect processes, resulting in an improved plating uniformity and interconnect yield.

physics.ins-det↗

Persistent Upflows and Downflows at Active Region boundaries Observed by SUTRI and AIA

Upflows and downflows at active region (AR) boundaries have been frequently observed with spectroscopic observations at extreme ultraviolet (EUV) passbands. In this paper, we report the coexistence of upflows and downflows at the AR boundaries with imaging observations from the Solar Upper Transition Region Imager (SUTRI) and the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA). With their observations from 2022 September 21 to 2022 September 30, we find 17 persistent opposite flows occurring along the AR coronal loops. The upflows are prominent in the AIA 193 Åimages with a velocity of 50-200 km/s, while the downflows are best seen in the SUTRI 465 Åand AIA 131 Åimages with a slower velocity of tens of kilometers per second (characteristic temperatures (log T(K)) for 193 Å, 465 Åand 131 Åare 6.2, 5.7, 5.6, respectively). We also analyze the center-to-limb variation of the velocities for both upflows and downflows. The simultaneous observations of downflows and upflows can be explained by the chromosphere-corona mass-cycling process, in which the localized chromospheric plasma is impulsively heated to coronal temperature forming a upflow and then these upflows experience radiative cooling producing a downflow with the previously heated plasma returning to the lower atmosphere. In particular, the persistent downflows seen by SUTRI provide strong evidence of the cooling process in the mass cycle. For upflows associated with open loops, part of the plasma is able to escape outward and into the heliosphere as solar wind.

astro-ph.SR↗

Rethinking Model Ensemble in Transfer-based Adversarial Attacks

It is widely recognized that deep learning models lack robustness to adversarial examples. An intriguing property of adversarial examples is that they can transfer across different models, which enables black-box attacks without any knowledge of the victim model. An effective strategy to improve the transferability is attacking an ensemble of models. However, previous works simply average the outputs of different models, lacking an in-depth analysis on how and why model ensemble methods can strongly improve the transferability. In this paper, we rethink the ensemble in adversarial attacks and define the common weakness of model ensemble with two properties: 1) the flatness of loss landscape; and 2) the closeness to the local optimum of each model. We empirically and theoretically show that both properties are strongly correlated with the transferability and propose a Common Weakness Attack (CWA) to generate more transferable adversarial examples by promoting these two properties. Experimental results on both image classification and object detection tasks validate the effectiveness of our approach to improving the adversarial transferability, especially when attacking adversarially trained models. We also successfully apply our method to attack a black-box large vision-language model -- Google's Bard, showing the practical effectiveness. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/huanranchen/AdversarialAttacks}.

cs.CV↗

SDXL-Lightning: Progressive Adversarial Diffusion Distillation

We propose a diffusion distillation method that achieves new state-of-the-art in one-step/few-step 1024px text-to-image generation based on SDXL. Our method combines progressive and adversarial distillation to achieve a balance between quality and mode coverage. In this paper, we discuss the theoretical analysis, discriminator design, model formulation, and training techniques. We open-source our distilled SDXL-Lightning models both as LoRA and full UNet weights.

cs.CV↗

BSPA: Exploring Black-box Stealthy Prompt Attacks against Image Generators

Extremely large image generators offer significant transformative potential across diverse sectors. It allows users to design specific prompts to generate realistic images through some black-box APIs. However, some studies reveal that image generators are notably susceptible to attacks and generate Not Suitable For Work (NSFW) contents by manually designed toxin texts, especially imperceptible to human observers. We urgently need a multitude of universal and transferable prompts to improve the safety of image generators, especially black-box-released APIs. Nevertheless, they are constrained by labor-intensive design processes and heavily reliant on the quality of the given instructions. To achieve this, we introduce a black-box stealthy prompt attack (BSPA) that adopts a retriever to simulate attacks from API users. It can effectively harness filter scores to tune the retrieval space of sensitive words for matching the input prompts, thereby crafting stealthy prompts tailored for image generators. Significantly, this approach is model-agnostic and requires no internal access to the model's features, ensuring its applicability to a wide range of image generators. Building on BSPA, we have constructed an automated prompt tool and a comprehensive prompt attack dataset (NSFWeval). Extensive experiments demonstrate that BSPA effectively explores the security vulnerabilities in a variety of state-of-the-art available black-box models, including Stable Diffusion XL, Midjourney, and DALL-E 2/3. Furthermore, we develop a resilient text filter and offer targeted recommendations to ensure the security of image generators against prompt attacks in the future.

cs.CR↗

Evil Geniuses: Delving into the Safety of LLM-based Agents

Rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have revitalized in LLM-based agents, exhibiting impressive human-like behaviors and cooperative capabilities in various scenarios. However, these agents also bring some exclusive risks, stemming from the complexity of interaction environments and the usability of tools. This paper delves into the safety of LLM-based agents from three perspectives: agent quantity, role definition, and attack level. Specifically, we initially propose to employ a template-based attack strategy on LLM-based agents to find the influence of agent quantity. In addition, to address interaction environment and role specificity issues, we introduce Evil Geniuses (EG), an effective attack method that autonomously generates prompts related to the original role to examine the impact across various role definitions and attack levels. EG leverages Red-Blue exercises, significantly improving the generated prompt aggressiveness and similarity to original roles. Our evaluations on CAMEL, Metagpt and ChatDev based on GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, demonstrate high success rates. Extensive evaluation and discussion reveal that these agents are less robust, prone to more harmful behaviors, and capable of generating stealthier content than LLMs, highlighting significant safety challenges and guiding future research. Our code is available at https://github.com/T1aNS1R/Evil-Geniuses.

cs.CL↗