Verification and safety assessment of neural network controlled systems (NNCSs) is an emerging challenge. To provide guarantees, verification tools must efficiently capture the interplay between the neural network and the physical system within the control loop. In this paper, a compositional approach focused on inclusion preserving long term symbolic dependency modeling is proposed for the analysis of NNCSs. First of all, the matrix structure of symbolic zonotopes is exploited to efficiently abstract the input/output mapping of the loop elements through (inclusion preserving) affine symbolic expressions, thus maintaining linear dependencies between interacting blocks. Then, two further extensions are studied. Firstly, symbolic polynotopes are used to abstract the loop elements behaviour by means of polynomial symbolic expressions and dependencies. Secondly, an original input partitioning algorithm takes advantage of symbol preservation to assess the sensitivity of the computed approximation to some input directions. The approach is evaluated via different numerical examples and benchmarks. A good trade-off between low conservatism and computational efficiency is obtained.
Among critical infrastructures, power grids and communication infrastructure are identified as uniquely critical since they enable the operation of all other sectors. Due to their vital role, the research community has undertaken extensive efforts to understand the complex dynamics and resilience characteristics of these infrastructures, albeit independently. However, power and communication infrastructures are also interconnected, and the nature of the Internet's dependence on power grids is poorly understood. In this paper, we take the first step toward characterizing the role of power grids in Internet resilience by analyzing the overlap of global power and Internet infrastructures. We investigate the impact of power grid failures on Internet availability and find that nearly $65\%$ of the public Internet infrastructure components are concentrated in a few ($< 10$) power grid failure zones. More importantly, power grid dependencies severely limit the number of disjoint availability zones of cloud providers. When dependency on grids serving data center locations is taken into account, the number of isolated AWS Availability Zones reduces from 87 to 19. Building upon our findings, we develop NetWattZap, an Internet resilience analysis tool that generates power grid dependency-aware deployment suggestions for Internet infrastructure and application components, which can also take into account a wide variety of user requirements.
The emergence of new communication technologies allows us to expand our understanding of distributed control and consider collaborative decision-making paradigms. With collaborative algorithms, certain local decision-making entities (or agents) are enabled to communicate and collaborate on their actions with one another to attain better system behavior. By limiting the amount of communication, these algorithms exist somewhere between centralized and fully distributed approaches. To understand the possible benefits of this inter-agent collaboration, we model a multi-agent system as a common-interest game in which groups of agents can collaborate on their actions to jointly increase the system welfare. We specifically consider $k$-strong Nash equilibria as the emergent behavior of these systems and address how well these states approximate the system optimal, formalized by the $k$-strong price of anarchy ratio. Our main contributions are in generating tight bounds on the $k$-strong price of anarchy in finite resource allocation games as the solution to a tractable linear program. By varying $k$ --the maximum size of a collaborative coalition--we observe exactly how much performance is gained from inter-agent collaboration. To investigate further opportunities for improvement, we generate upper bounds on the maximum attainable $k$-strong price of anarchy when the agents' utility function can be designed.
Deep neural networks have been widely used in various downstream tasks, especially those safety-critical scenario such as autonomous driving, but deep networks are often threatened by adversarial samples. Such adversarial attacks can be invisible to human eyes, but can lead to DNN misclassification, and often exhibits transferability between deep learning and machine learning models and real-world achievability. Adversarial attacks can be divided into white-box attacks, for which the attacker knows the parameters and gradient of the model, and black-box attacks, for the latter, the attacker can only obtain the input and output of the model. In terms of the attacker's purpose, it can be divided into targeted attacks and non-targeted attacks, which means that the attacker wants the model to misclassify the original sample into the specified class, which is more practical, while the non-targeted attack just needs to make the model misclassify the sample. The black box setting is a scenario we will encounter in practice.
Named entity recognition (NER) systems have seen rapid progress in recent years due to the development of deep neural networks. These systems are widely used in various natural language processing applications, such as information extraction, question answering, and sentiment analysis. However, the complexity and intractability of deep neural networks can make NER systems unreliable in certain circumstances, resulting in incorrect predictions. For example, NER systems may misidentify female names as chemicals or fail to recognize the names of minority groups, leading to user dissatisfaction. To tackle this problem, we introduce TIN, a novel, widely applicable approach for automatically testing and repairing various NER systems. The key idea for automated testing is that the NER predictions of the same named entities under similar contexts should be identical. The core idea for automated repairing is that similar named entities should have the same NER prediction under the same context. We use TIN to test two SOTA NER models and two commercial NER APIs, i.e., Azure NER and AWS NER. We manually verify 784 of the suspicious issues reported by TIN and find that 702 are erroneous issues, leading to high precision (85.0%-93.4%) across four categories of NER errors: omission, over-labeling, incorrect category, and range error. For automated repairing, TIN achieves a high error reduction rate (26.8%-50.6%) over the four systems under test, which successfully repairs 1,056 out of the 1,877 reported NER errors.
What is learned by sophisticated neural network agents such as AlphaZero? This question is of both scientific and practical interest. If the representations of strong neural networks bear no resemblance to human concepts, our ability to understand faithful explanations of their decisions will be restricted, ultimately limiting what we can achieve with neural network interpretability. In this work we provide evidence that human knowledge is acquired by the AlphaZero neural network as it trains on the game of chess. By probing for a broad range of human chess concepts we show when and where these concepts are represented in the AlphaZero network. We also provide a behavioural analysis focusing on opening play, including qualitative analysis from chess Grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik. Finally, we carry out a preliminary investigation looking at the low-level details of AlphaZero's representations, and make the resulting behavioural and representational analyses available online.
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question answering or machine translation). However, it builds upon the assumption that the data distribution is stationary, ie. that the data is sampled from a fixed distribution both at training and test time. This way of training is inconsistent with how we as humans are able to learn from and operate within a constantly changing stream of information. Moreover, it is ill-adapted to real-world use cases where the data distribution is expected to shift over the course of a model's lifetime. The first goal of this thesis is to characterize the different forms this shift can take in the context of natural language processing, and propose benchmarks and evaluation metrics to measure its effect on current deep learning architectures. We then proceed to take steps to mitigate the effect of distributional shift on NLP models. To this end, we develop methods based on parametric reformulations of the distributionally robust optimization framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that these approaches yield more robust models as demonstrated on a selection of realistic problems. In the third and final part of this thesis, we explore ways of efficiently adapting existing models to new domains or tasks. Our contribution to this topic takes inspiration from information geometry to derive a new gradient update rule which alleviate catastrophic forgetting issues during adaptation.
Deep neural networks have revolutionized many machine learning tasks in power systems, ranging from pattern recognition to signal processing. The data in these tasks is typically represented in Euclidean domains. Nevertheless, there is an increasing number of applications in power systems, where data are collected from non-Euclidean domains and represented as the graph-structured data with high dimensional features and interdependency among nodes. The complexity of graph-structured data has brought significant challenges to the existing deep neural networks defined in Euclidean domains. Recently, many studies on extending deep neural networks for graph-structured data in power systems have emerged. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in power systems is proposed. Specifically, several classical paradigms of GNNs structures (e.g., graph convolutional networks, graph recurrent neural networks, graph attention networks, graph generative networks, spatial-temporal graph convolutional networks, and hybrid forms of GNNs) are summarized, and key applications in power systems such as fault diagnosis, power prediction, power flow calculation, and data generation are reviewed in detail. Furthermore, main issues and some research trends about the applications of GNNs in power systems are discussed.
Ensembles over neural network weights trained from different random initialization, known as deep ensembles, achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and calibration. The recently introduced batch ensembles provide a drop-in replacement that is more parameter efficient. In this paper, we design ensembles not only over weights, but over hyperparameters to improve the state of the art in both settings. For best performance independent of budget, we propose hyper-deep ensembles, a simple procedure that involves a random search over different hyperparameters, themselves stratified across multiple random initializations. Its strong performance highlights the benefit of combining models with both weight and hyperparameter diversity. We further propose a parameter efficient version, hyper-batch ensembles, which builds on the layer structure of batch ensembles and self-tuning networks. The computational and memory costs of our method are notably lower than typical ensembles. On image classification tasks, with MLP, LeNet, and Wide ResNet 28-10 architectures, our methodology improves upon both deep and batch ensembles.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.