You are cordially invited to attend the biweekly Brookhaven AI Mixer (BAM). BAM includes one short talk on AI research happening at BNL, followed by an open mixer over coffee and snacks for everyone to network and discuss all things AI. The first half hour will consist of presentations that will be available via ZOOM, and the second half hour will be for in person only networking.
Join us every other Tuesday at noon in CDSD's Training Room (building 725, 2nd floor) to learn about interesting AI methods and applications, engage with potential collaborators, prepare for pending FASST funding calls, and build a community of AI for Science at BNL.
Experiencing Machine Learning in Collider-Accelerator Control System
Abstract: The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Collider-Accelerator Department (C-AD) of BNL provides the world's only high-energy polarized proton beam. It is in the unique position to study where nuclei obtain their spin. During 25 years of operation at RHIC, the C-AD controls group has developed its own control system to tune the accelerator performance, which contains millions of control points. The successful operation of this system will highly affect the machine performance. RHIC's successor, the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), will be one of the most complex scientific instruments ever built, with the capability of colliding polarized proton and electron beams. The increasing complexity of instruments will require new, sophisticated control methods/tools to tune and optimize the accelerator performance. In this talk, I will summarize some projects developed in recent years that utilize machine learning in the C-AD controls group.
Biography: Dr. Yuan Gao is an assistant scientist at the Collider-Accelerator Department (C-AD) at Brookhaven, primarily working on developing new machine learning schemes in the control group to enhance system performance. His research interests include game theory, algorithm design, anomaly detection, and simulation modeling.
Location: CDS, Bldg. 725, Training Room
Join ZoomGov Meeting: https://bnl.zoomgov.com/j/1604302440?pwd=0x2I95PIvbkkzIi6rA0MNnon5k2sux.1
Meeting ID: 160 430 2440
Passcode: 478223
Place: https://stonybrook.
Time: 3 PM EST - Dec, 16th, 2020
Abstract:
Shadows provide useful cues to analyze visual scenes but also hamper many computer vision algorithms such as image segmentation, object detection, or tracking. For those reasons, shadow detection and shadow removal have been well-studied in computer vision.
Early work on shadow detection and removal focused on physical illumination models of shadows. These methods can express, identify, and remove shadows in a physically plausible manner. However, these models are often hard to optimize and are slow during inference due to their reliance on hand-designed image features. Recently, deep-learning approaches have achieved breakthroughs in performance for both shadow detection and removal. They learn to extract useful features through training while being extremely efficient during inference. However, these models are data-dependent, opaque, and ignore the physical aspects of shadows. Thus they often lack generalization and produce inconsistent results.
We propose incorporating physical illumination constraints of shadows into deep-learning models. These constraints force the networks to more closely follow the physics of shadows, enabling them to systematically and realistically modify shadows in images. For shadow detection, we present a novel Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based model where the generator learns to generate images with realistic attenuated shadows that can be used to train a shadow detector. For shadow removal, we propose a method that uses deep-networks to estimate the unknown parameters of a shadow image formation model that removes shadows. The system outputs high-quality shadow-free images with little or no image artifacts and achieves state-of-the-art performance in shadow removal when trained on a fully-supervised setting. Moreover, the system is easy to train and constrain since the shadow removal mapping is strictly defined by the simplified illumination model with interpretable parameters. Thus, it can be trained even with a much weaker form of supervision signal. In particular, we show that we can use two sets of patches, shadow and shadow-free, to train our shadow decomposition framework via an adversarial system. These patches are cropped from the shadow images themselves.
Therefore, this is the first deep-learning method for shadow removal that can be trained without any shadow-free images, providing an alternative solution to the paired data dependency issue. The advantage of this training scheme is even more pronounced when tested on a novel domain such as video shadow removal where the method can be fine-tuned on a testing video with only the shadow masks generated by a pre-trained shadow detector and further improves shadow removal results.
NLP Reading Group | Fall 2025
The Natural Language Processing Reading Group at Stony Brook University meets weekly to discuss recent research papers in NLP and related fields.
Join the Google Group here.
The Natural Language Processing Reading Group at Stony Brook University meets weekly to discuss recent research papers in NLP and related fields.
Join the Google Group here.
Abstract: Self-supervised representation learning (SRL) has emerged as a pivotal advancement in machine learning, offering high-quality data representations without the need for labeled datasets. While SRL has demonstrated enhanced adversarial robustness compared to supervised learning, its resilience against other attack types, particularly backdoor attacks, remains an open question. Recent studies have revealed potential vulnerabilities in SRL, underscoring the necessity for a comprehensive security analysis. However, existing research often extrapolates attacks from supervised learning paradigms, neglecting the unique challenges and opportunities inherent to self-supervised mechanisms.
This thesis proposal aims to address three critical objectives in the realm of self-supervised learning: (1) exploring novel attack vectors, (2) implementing and evaluating practical attacks, and (3) developing robust countermeasures. We focus on two key SRL paradigms: Contrastive Learning and Diffusion Models. For Contrastive Learning, we synthesize existing security vulnerabilities and introduce innovative attack vectors, such as CTRL, to uncover distinctive risks. We conduct a comparative analysis of contrastive and supervised learning approaches in their defense against these threats, exploring potential safeguards and highlighting the limitations of current protective measures in self-supervised contexts. Regarding Diffusion Models, we demonstrate inherent vulnerabilities in their application to adversarial purification.
Our research aims to illuminate the unique challenges posed by emerging attack vectors in self-supervised learning, fostering technical advancements to address underlying security risks in real-world applications. By contributing to the development of more resilient and secure self-supervised representation learning systems, we seek to enhance their reliability and trustworthiness in practical scenarios. This comprehensive examination of SRL's security landscape will provide valuable insights for the broader machine-learning community and pave the way for more robust AI systems.
Join here.
This thesis proposal aims to address three critical objectives in the realm of self-supervised learning: (1) exploring novel attack vectors, (2) implementing and evaluating practical attacks, and (3) developing robust countermeasures. We focus on two key SRL paradigms: Contrastive Learning and Diffusion Models. For Contrastive Learning, we synthesize existing security vulnerabilities and introduce innovative attack vectors, such as CTRL, to uncover distinctive risks. We conduct a comparative analysis of contrastive and supervised learning approaches in their defense against these threats, exploring potential safeguards and highlighting the limitations of current protective measures in self-supervised contexts. Regarding Diffusion Models, we demonstrate inherent vulnerabilities in their application to adversarial purification.
Our research aims to illuminate the unique challenges posed by emerging attack vectors in self-supervised learning, fostering technical advancements to address underlying security risks in real-world applications. By contributing to the development of more resilient and secure self-supervised representation learning systems, we seek to enhance their reliability and trustworthiness in practical scenarios. This comprehensive examination of SRL's security landscape will provide valuable insights for the broader machine-learning community and pave the way for more robust AI systems.
Join here.
The Tiger Team open house will be Monday, September 20 at high noon by Zoom:
https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/
Are you tired of drowning in a sea of resumes and losing top talent in the hiring whirlwind? Transform your hiring process through a different lens and learn about AI in the Workplace and the Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Whether you're a recent graduate seeking your first job or an undergraduate student looking to delve into more career-oriented opportunities, this workshop by SBU Career Center is designed to equip you with the knowledge and strategies needed to succeed.
Register here: https://stonybrook.joinhandshake.com/stu/events/1568133?
Hidden Biases. Ethical Issues in NLP, and What to Do about Them presented by Dirk Hovy of Bocconi University
ABSTRACT: Through language, we fundamentally express who we are as humans. This property makes text a fantastic resource for research into the complexity of the human mind, from social sciences to humanities. However, it is exactly that property that also creates some ethical problems. Texts reflect the authors' biases, which get magnified by statistical models. This has unintended consequences for our analysis: If our data is not reflective of the population as a whole, if we do not pay attention to the biases contained, we can easily draw the wrong conclusions, and create disadvantages for our users.
In this talk, I will discuss several types of biases that affect NLP models, their sources, and potential counter measures: (1) Bias stemming from data, i.e., selection bias (if our texts do not adequately reflect the population we want to study), label bias (if the labels we use are skewed) and semantic bias (the latent stereotypes encoded in embeddings); (2) Biases deriving from the models themselves, i.e., their tendency to amplify any imbalances that are present in the data; (3) Design bias, i.e., the biases arising from our (the researchers) decisions which topics to analyze, which data sets to use, and what to do with them. For each bias, I will provide examples and discuss the possible ramifications for a wide range of applications, and various ways to address and counteract these biases, ranging from simple labeling considerations to new types of models.
BIO: Dirk Hovey is an associate professor of Computer Science in the department of marketing at Bocconi University. He received his PhD from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he worked as a research assistant at the Information Sciences Institute.
He works in Natural Language Processing (NLP), a subfield of artificial intelligence. His research focuses on computational social science. His interests include integrating sociolinguistic knowledge into NLP models, using large-scale statistics to model the interaction between people's socio-demographic profile and their language use, and ethics for data science and algorithmic fairness.
ABSTRACT: Through language, we fundamentally express who we are as humans. This property makes text a fantastic resource for research into the complexity of the human mind, from social sciences to humanities. However, it is exactly that property that also creates some ethical problems. Texts reflect the authors' biases, which get magnified by statistical models. This has unintended consequences for our analysis: If our data is not reflective of the population as a whole, if we do not pay attention to the biases contained, we can easily draw the wrong conclusions, and create disadvantages for our users.
In this talk, I will discuss several types of biases that affect NLP models, their sources, and potential counter measures: (1) Bias stemming from data, i.e., selection bias (if our texts do not adequately reflect the population we want to study), label bias (if the labels we use are skewed) and semantic bias (the latent stereotypes encoded in embeddings); (2) Biases deriving from the models themselves, i.e., their tendency to amplify any imbalances that are present in the data; (3) Design bias, i.e., the biases arising from our (the researchers) decisions which topics to analyze, which data sets to use, and what to do with them. For each bias, I will provide examples and discuss the possible ramifications for a wide range of applications, and various ways to address and counteract these biases, ranging from simple labeling considerations to new types of models.
BIO: Dirk Hovey is an associate professor of Computer Science in the department of marketing at Bocconi University. He received his PhD from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he worked as a research assistant at the Information Sciences Institute.
He works in Natural Language Processing (NLP), a subfield of artificial intelligence. His research focuses on computational social science. His interests include integrating sociolinguistic knowledge into NLP models, using large-scale statistics to model the interaction between people's socio-demographic profile and their language use, and ethics for data science and algorithmic fairness.
A great opportunity for students who will need to integrate AI as a research tool, as well as to think about how job opportunities can be impacted by the growing usage of AI.
Event information
Event information
Location: SAC Auditorium, RSVP
Spring 2025, Mondays 3.30 to 4.50 pm, NCS 220.
The seminar will be jointly taught by Prof. Chao Chen, chao.chen.1@stonybrook.edu and Prof. Dimitris Samaras samaras@cs.stonybrook.edu
The overall purpose of this seminar is to bring together people with interests
in Computer Vision theory and techniques and to examine current research issues. This course will be appropriate for people who already took a Computer Vision graduate course or already had research experience in Computer Vision.
To enroll in this course, you must either: (1) be in the Ph.D. program or (2) receive permission from the instructors.
Each seminar will consist of multiple short talks (around 15 minutes) by multiple students. Students can register for 1 credit for CSE656. Registered students must attend and present a minimum of 2 talks. Registered students must attend in person. Up to 3 absences will be excused. Everyone else is welcome to attend.
Join here. Meeting ID: 927 2069 8658. Passcode: 130934.
.
The seminar will be jointly taught by Prof. Chao Chen, chao.chen.1@stonybrook.edu and Prof. Dimitris Samaras samaras@cs.stonybrook.edu
The overall purpose of this seminar is to bring together people with interests
in Computer Vision theory and techniques and to examine current research issues. This course will be appropriate for people who already took a Computer Vision graduate course or already had research experience in Computer Vision.
To enroll in this course, you must either: (1) be in the Ph.D. program or (2) receive permission from the instructors.
Each seminar will consist of multiple short talks (around 15 minutes) by multiple students. Students can register for 1 credit for CSE656. Registered students must attend and present a minimum of 2 talks. Registered students must attend in person. Up to 3 absences will be excused. Everyone else is welcome to attend.
Join here. Meeting ID: 927 2069 8658. Passcode: 130934.
.