Deep learning is at the heart of the current rise of artificial intelligence. In the field of computer vision, it has become the workhorse for applications ranging from self-driving cars to surveillance and security. Whereas, deep neural networks have demonstrated phenomenal success (often beyond human capabilities) in solving complex problems, recent studies show that they are vulnerable to adversarial attacks in the form of subtle perturbations to inputs that lead a model to predict incorrect outputs. For images, such perturbations are often too small to be perceptible, yet they completely fool the deep learning models. Adversarial attacks pose a serious threat to the success of deep learning in practice. This fact has recently led to a large influx of contributions in this direction. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey on adversarial attacks on deep learning in computer vision. We review the works that design adversarial attacks, analyze the existence of such attacks and propose defenses against them. To emphasize that adversarial attacks are possible in practical conditions, we separately review the contributions that evaluate adversarial attacks in the real-world scenarios. Finally, drawing on the reviewed literature, we provide a broader outlook of this research direction.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language processing tasks and beyond. This success of LLMs has led to a large influx of research contributions in this direction. These works encompass diverse topics such as architectural innovations, better training strategies, context length improvements, fine-tuning, multimodal LLMs, robotics, datasets, benchmarking, efficiency, and more. With the rapid development of techniques and regular breakthroughs in LLM research, it has become considerably challenging to perceive the bigger picture of the advances in this direction. Considering the rapidly emerging plethora of literature on LLMs, it is imperative that the research community is able to benefit from a concise yet comprehensive overview of the recent developments in this field. This article provides an overview of the literature on a broad range of LLM-related concepts. Our self-contained comprehensive overview of LLMs discusses relevant background concepts along with covering the advanced topics at the frontier of research in LLMs. This review article is intended to provide not only a systematic survey but also a quick, comprehensive reference for the researchers and practitioners to draw insights from extensive, informative summaries of the existing works to advance the LLM research.

Deep Learning is the most widely used tool in the contemporary field of computer vision. Its ability to accurately solve complex problems is employed in vision research to learn deep neural models for a variety of tasks, including security critical applications. However, it is now known that deep learning is vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can manipulate its predictions by introducing visually imperceptible perturbations in images and videos. Since the discovery of this phenomenon in 2013, it has attracted significant attention of researchers from multiple sub-fields of machine intelligence. In 2018, we published the first-ever review of the contributions made by the computer vision community in adversarial attacks on deep learning (and their defenses). Many of those contributions have inspired new directions in this area, which has matured significantly since witnessing the first generation methods. Hence, as a legacy sequel of our first literature survey, this review article focuses on the advances in this area since 2018. We thoroughly discuss the first generation attacks and comprehensively cover the modern attacks and their defenses appearing in the prestigious sources of computer vision and machine learning research. Besides offering the most comprehensive literature review of adversarial attacks and defenses to date, the article also provides concise definitions of technical terminologies for the non-experts. Finally, it discusses challenges and future outlook of this direction based on the literature since the advent of this research direction.

Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) plays an important role in solving many fundamental problems in video analysis and computer vision. Most MOT methods employ two steps: Object Detection and Data Association. The first step detects objects of interest in every frame of a video, and the second establishes correspondence between the detected objects in different frames to obtain their tracks. Object detection has made tremendous progress in the last few years due to deep learning. However, data association for tracking still relies on hand crafted constraints such as appearance, motion, spatial proximity, grouping etc. to compute affinities between the objects in different frames. In this paper, we harness the power of deep learning for data association in tracking by jointly modeling object appearances and their affinities between different frames in an end-to-end fashion. The proposed Deep Affinity Network (DAN) learns compact, yet comprehensive features of pre-detected objects at several levels of abstraction, and performs exhaustive pairing permutations of those features in any two frames to infer object affinities. DAN also accounts for multiple objects appearing and disappearing between video frames. We exploit the resulting efficient affinity computations to associate objects in the current frame deep into the previous frames for reliable on-line tracking. Our technique is evaluated on popular multiple object tracking challenges MOT15, MOT17 and UA-DETRAC. Comprehensive benchmarking under twelve evaluation metrics demonstrates that our approach is among the best performing techniques on the leader board for these challenges. The open source implementation of our work is available at https://github.com/shijieS/SST.git.

Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) has recently benefitted greatly from U-shaped neural models. However, largely overlooking effective global information modeling, existing techniques struggle when the target has high similarities with the background. We present a S patial-channel C ross T ransformer Net work (SCTransNet) that leverages spatial-channel cross transformer blocks (SCTBs) on top of long-range skip connections to address the aforementioned challenge. In the proposed SCTBs, the outputs of all encoders are interacted with cross transformer to generate mixed features, which are redistributed to all decoders to effectively reinforce semantic differences between the target and clutter at full levels. Specifically, SCTB contains the following two key elements: (a) spatial-embedded single-head channel-cross attention (SSCA) for exchanging local spatial features and full-level global channel information to eliminate ambiguity among the encoders and facilitate high-level semantic associations of the images, and (b) a complementary feed-forward network (CFN) for enhancing the feature discriminability via a multi-scale strategy and cross-spatial-channel information interaction to promote beneficial information transfer. Our SCTransNet effectively encodes the semantic differences between targets and backgrounds to boost its internal representation for detecting small infrared targets accurately. Extensive experiments on three public datasets, NUDT-SIRST, NUAA-SIRST, and IRSTD-1K, demonstrate that the proposed SCTransNet outperforms existing IRSTD methods. Our code will be made public at https://github.com/xdFai/SCTransNet.

Medical image analysis is currently experiencing a paradigm shift due to deep learning. This technology has recently attracted so much interest of the Medical Imaging Community that it led to a specialized conference in “Medical Imaging with Deep Learning” in the year 2018. This paper surveys the recent developments in this direction and provides a critical review of the related major aspects. We organize the reviewed literature according to the underlying pattern recognition tasks and further sub-categorize it following a taxonomy based on human anatomy. This paper does not assume prior knowledge of deep learning and makes a significant contribution in explaining the core deep learning concepts to the non-experts in the Medical Community. This paper provides a unique computer vision/machine learning perspective taken on the advances of deep learning in medical imaging. This enables us to single out “lack of appropriately annotated large-scale data sets” as the core challenge (among other challenges) in this research direction. We draw on the insights from the sister research fields of computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning, where the techniques of dealing with such challenges have already matured, to provide promising directions for the Medical Imaging Community to fully harness deep learning in the future.