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Akshay Agarwal

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Published work

9 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

The Unseen Adversaries: Robust and Generalized Defense Against Adversarial Patches

The vulnerabilities of deep neural networks against singularities have raised serious concerns regarding their deployment in the physical world. One of the most prominent and impactful physical-world adversarial perturbations is the attachment of patches to clean images, known as an adversarial patch attack. Similarly, natural noises such as Gaussian and Salt\&Pepper are highly prevalent in the real world. The current research need arises from the above vulnerabilities and the lack of efforts to tackle these two singularities independently and, especially, in combination. In this research, we have, for the first time, combined these two prominent singularities and proposed a novel dataset. Using this dataset, we have conducted a benchmark study of singularity data-point detection using features from several convolutional neural networks. For classification, rather than the popular neural network-based parameter tuning, we have used traditional yet effective machine learning classifiers. The extensive experiments across various in- and out-of-distribution (OOD) singularities reveal several interesting findings about the effectiveness of classifiers and show that it is hard to defend against adversaries when they are treated independently, and inefficient classifiers are selected.

preprint2021arXiv

Evaluating Empathetic Chatbots in Customer Service Settings

Customer service is a setting that calls for empathy in live human agent responses. Recent advances have demonstrated how open-domain chatbots can be trained to demonstrate empathy when responding to live human utterances. We show that a blended skills chatbot model that responds to customer queries is more likely to resemble actual human agent response if it is trained to recognize emotion and exhibit appropriate empathy, than a model without such training. For our analysis, we leverage a Twitter customer service dataset containing several million customer<->agent dialog examples in customer service contexts from 20 well-known brands.

preprint2020arXiv

IBM Functional Genomics Platform, A Cloud-Based Platform for Studying Microbial Life at Scale

The rapid growth in biological sequence data is revolutionizing our understanding of genotypic diversity and challenging conventional approaches to informatics. With the increasing availability of genomic data, traditional bioinformatic tools require substantial computational time and the creation of ever-larger indices each time a researcher seeks to gain insight from the data. To address these challenges, we pre-computed important relationships between biological entities spanning the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology and captured this information in a relational database. The database can be queried across hundreds of millions of entities and returns results in a fraction of the time required by traditional methods. In this paper, we describe \textit{IBM Functional Genomics Platform} (formerly known as OMXWare), a comprehensive database relating genotype to phenotype for bacterial life. Continually updated, IBM Functional Genomics Platform today contains data derived from 200,000 curated, self-consistently assembled genomes. The database stores functional data for over 68 million genes, 52 million proteins, and 239 million domains with associated biological activity annotations from Gene Ontology, KEGG, MetaCyc, and Reactome. IBM Functional Genomics Platform maps all of the many-to-many connections between each biological entity including the originating genome, gene, protein, and protein domain. Various microbial studies, from infectious disease to environmental health, can benefit from the rich data and connections. We describe the data selection, the pipeline to create and update the IBM Functional Genomics Platform, and the developer tools (Python SDK and REST APIs) which allow researchers to efficiently study microbial life at scale.

preprint2020arXiv

Image-Histogram-based Secondary Electron Counting to Evaluate Detective Quantum Efficiency in SEM

Scanning electron microscopy is a powerful tool for nanoscale imaging of organic and inorganic materials. An important metric for characterizing the limits of performance of these microscopes is the Detective Quantum Efficiency (DQE), which measures the fraction of emitted secondary electrons (SEs) that are detected by the SE detector. However, common techniques for measuring DQE approximate the SE emission process to be Poisson distributed, which can lead to incorrect DQE values. In this paper, we introduce a technique for measuring DQE in which we directly count the mean number of secondary electrons detected from a sample using image histograms. This technique does not assume Poisson distribution of SEs and makes it possible to accurately measure DQE for a wider range of imaging conditions. As a demonstration of our technique, we map the variation of DQE as a function of working distance in the microscope.

preprint2020arXiv

Large-area microwire MoSi single-photon detectors at 1550 nm wavelength

We demonstrate saturated internal detection efficiency at 1550 nm wavelengths for meander-shaped superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors made of 3 nm thick MoSi films with widths of 1 and 3 $μm$, and active areas up to 400 by 400 $μm^2$. Despite hairpin turns and a large number of squares (up to $10^4$) in the device, the dark count rate was measured to be ~10$^3$ cps at 99% of the switching current. This value is about two orders of magnitude lower than results reported recently for short MoSi devices with shunt resistors. We also found that 5 nm thick MoSi detectors with the same geometry were insensitive to single near-infrared photons, which may be associated with different levels of suppression of the superconducting order parameter. However, our results obtained on 3 nm thick MoSi devices are in a good agreement with predictions in the frame of a kinetic-equation approach.

preprint2020arXiv

On the Robustness of Face Recognition Algorithms Against Attacks and Bias

Face recognition algorithms have demonstrated very high recognition performance, suggesting suitability for real world applications. Despite the enhanced accuracies, robustness of these algorithms against attacks and bias has been challenged. This paper summarizes different ways in which the robustness of a face recognition algorithm is challenged, which can severely affect its intended working. Different types of attacks such as physical presentation attacks, disguise/makeup, digital adversarial attacks, and morphing/tampering using GANs have been discussed. We also present a discussion on the effect of bias on face recognition models and showcase that factors such as age and gender variations affect the performance of modern algorithms. The paper also presents the potential reasons for these challenges and some of the future research directions for increasing the robustness of face recognition models.

preprint2020arXiv

Securing CNN Model and Biometric Template using Blockchain

Blockchain has emerged as a leading technology that ensures security in a distributed framework. Recently, it has been shown that blockchain can be used to convert traditional blocks of any deep learning models into secure systems. In this research, we model a trained biometric recognition system in an architecture which leverages the blockchain technology to provide fault tolerant access in a distributed environment. The advantage of the proposed approach is that tampering in one particular component alerts the whole system and helps in easy identification of `any' possible alteration. Experimentally, with different biometric modalities, we have shown that the proposed approach provides security to both deep learning model and the biometric template.

preprint2016arXiv

A nanofabricated, monolithic, path-separated electron interferometer

We report a self-aligned, monolithic electron interferometer, consisting of two 45 nm thick silicon layers separated by 20 $μ$m. This interferometer was fabricated from a single crystal silicon cantilever on a transmission electron microscope grid by gallium focused ion-beam milling. Using this interferometer, we demonstrate beam path-separation, and obtain interference fringes in a Mach-Zehnder geometry, in an unmodified 200 kV transmission electron microscope. The fringes have a period of 0.32 nm, which corresponds to the $\left[\bar{1}\bar{1}1\right]$ lattice planes of silicon, and a maximum contrast of 15 %. This design can potentially be scaled to millimeter-scale, and used in electron holography. It can also be applied to perform fundamental physics experiments, such as interaction-free measurement with electrons.

preprint2014arXiv

Power and efficiency analysis of a realistic resonant tunneling diode thermoelectric

Low-dimensional systems with sharp features in the density of states have been proposed as a means to improving the efficiency of thermoelectric devices. Quantum dot systems, which offer the sharpest density of states achievable, however, suffer from low power outputs while bulk (3-D) thermoelectrics, while displaying high power outputs, offer very low efficiencies. Here, we analyze the use of a resonant tunneling diode structure that combines the best of both aspects, that is, density of states distortion with a finite bandwidth due to confinement that aids the efficiency and a large number of current carrying transverse modes that enhances the total power output. We show that this device can achieve a high power output ($\sim 0.3$ MW$/m^2$) at efficiencies of $\sim 40\%$ of the Carnot efficiency due to the contribution from these transverse momentum states at a finite bandwidth of $kT/2$. We then provide a detailed analysis of the physics of charge and heat transport with insights on parasitic currents that reduce the efficiency. Finally, a comparison between the resonant tunneling diode and a quantum dot device with comparable bandwidth reveals that a similar performance requires ultra-dense areal quantum dot densities of $\sim 10^{12}/cm^2$.