An attack on deep learning systems where intelligent machines collaborate to solve problems could cause a node in the network to make a mistake on a critical judgment. At the same time, the security and privacy concerns of AI have galvanized the attention of experts from multiple disciplines. In this research, we successfully mounted adversarial attacks on a federated learning (FL) environment using three different datasets. The attacks leveraged generative adversarial networks (GANs) to affect the learning process and strive to reconstruct the private data of users by learning hidden features from shared local model parameters. The attack was target-oriented drawing data with distinct class distribution from the CIFAR- 10, MNIST, and Fashion-MNIST respectively. Moreover, by measuring the Euclidean distance between the real data and the reconstructed adversarial samples, we evaluated the performance of the adversary in the learning processes in various scenarios. At last, we successfully reconstructed the real data of the victim from the shared global model parameters with all the applied datasets.
Sequential recommendation as an emerging topic has attracted increasing attention due to its important practical significance. Models based on deep learning and attention mechanism have achieved good performance in sequential recommendation. Recently, the generative models based on Variational Autoencoder (VAE) have shown the unique advantage in collaborative filtering. In particular, the sequential VAE model as a recurrent version of VAE can effectively capture temporal dependencies among items in user sequence and perform sequential recommendation. However, VAE-based models suffer from a common limitation that the representational ability of the obtained approximate posterior distribution is limited, resulting in lower quality of generated samples. This is especially true for generating sequences. To solve the above problem, in this work, we propose a novel method called Adversarial and Contrastive Variational Autoencoder (ACVAE) for sequential recommendation. Specifically, we first introduce the adversarial training for sequence generation under the Adversarial Variational Bayes (AVB) framework, which enables our model to generate high-quality latent variables. Then, we employ the contrastive loss. The latent variables will be able to learn more personalized and salient characteristics by minimizing the contrastive loss. Besides, when encoding the sequence, we apply a recurrent and convolutional structure to capture global and local relationships in the sequence. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed ACVAE model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.
Recent advances in maximizing mutual information (MI) between the source and target have demonstrated its effectiveness in text generation. However, previous works paid little attention to modeling the backward network of MI (i.e., dependency from the target to the source), which is crucial to the tightness of the variational information maximization lower bound. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Mutual Information (AMI): a text generation framework which is formed as a novel saddle point (min-max) optimization aiming to identify joint interactions between the source and target. Within this framework, the forward and backward networks are able to iteratively promote or demote each other's generated instances by comparing the real and synthetic data distributions. We also develop a latent noise sampling strategy that leverages random variations at the high-level semantic space to enhance the long term dependency in the generation process. Extensive experiments based on different text generation tasks demonstrate that the proposed AMI framework can significantly outperform several strong baselines, and we also show that AMI has potential to lead to a tighter lower bound of maximum mutual information for the variational information maximization problem.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a hot research topic recently. GANs have been widely studied since 2014, and a large number of algorithms have been proposed. However, there is few comprehensive study explaining the connections among different GANs variants, and how they have evolved. In this paper, we attempt to provide a review on various GANs methods from the perspectives of algorithms, theory, and applications. Firstly, the motivations, mathematical representations, and structure of most GANs algorithms are introduced in details. Furthermore, GANs have been combined with other machine learning algorithms for specific applications, such as semi-supervised learning, transfer learning, and reinforcement learning. This paper compares the commonalities and differences of these GANs methods. Secondly, theoretical issues related to GANs are investigated. Thirdly, typical applications of GANs in image processing and computer vision, natural language processing, music, speech and audio, medical field, and data science are illustrated. Finally, the future open research problems for GANs are pointed out.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been extensively studied in the past few years. Arguably the revolutionary techniques are in the area of computer vision such as plausible image generation, image to image translation, facial attribute manipulation and similar domains. Despite the significant success achieved in computer vision field, applying GANs over real-world problems still have three main challenges: (1) High quality image generation; (2) Diverse image generation; and (3) Stable training. Considering numerous GAN-related research in the literature, we provide a study on the architecture-variants and loss-variants, which are proposed to handle these three challenges from two perspectives. We propose loss and architecture-variants for classifying most popular GANs, and discuss the potential improvements with focusing on these two aspects. While several reviews for GANs have been presented, there is no work focusing on the review of GAN-variants based on handling challenges mentioned above. In this paper, we review and critically discuss 7 architecture-variant GANs and 9 loss-variant GANs for remedying those three challenges. The objective of this review is to provide an insight on the footprint that current GANs research focuses on the performance improvement. Code related to GAN-variants studied in this work is summarized on //github.com/sheqi/GAN_Review.
Network embedding has become a hot research topic recently which can provide low-dimensional feature representations for many machine learning applications. Current work focuses on either (1) whether the embedding is designed as an unsupervised learning task by explicitly preserving the structural connectivity in the network, or (2) whether the embedding is a by-product during the supervised learning of a specific discriminative task in a deep neural network. In this paper, we focus on bridging the gap of the two lines of the research. We propose to adapt the Generative Adversarial model to perform network embedding, in which the generator is trying to generate vertex pairs, while the discriminator tries to distinguish the generated vertex pairs from real connections (edges) in the network. Wasserstein-1 distance is adopted to train the generator to gain better stability. We develop three variations of models, including GANE which applies cosine similarity, GANE-O1 which preserves the first-order proximity, and GANE-O2 which tries to preserves the second-order proximity of the network in the low-dimensional embedded vector space. We later prove that GANE-O2 has the same objective function as GANE-O1 when negative sampling is applied to simplify the training process in GANE-O2. Experiments with real-world network datasets demonstrate that our models constantly outperform state-of-the-art solutions with significant improvements on precision in link prediction, as well as on visualizations and accuracy in clustering tasks.
Recently introduced generative adversarial network (GAN) has been shown numerous promising results to generate realistic samples. The essential task of GAN is to control the features of samples generated from a random distribution. While the current GAN structures, such as conditional GAN, successfully generate samples with desired major features, they often fail to produce detailed features that bring specific differences among samples. To overcome this limitation, here we propose a controllable GAN (ControlGAN) structure. By separating a feature classifier from a discriminator, the generator of ControlGAN is designed to learn generating synthetic samples with the specific detailed features. Evaluated with multiple image datasets, ControlGAN shows a power to generate improved samples with well-controlled features. Furthermore, we demonstrate that ControlGAN can generate intermediate features and opposite features for interpolated and extrapolated input labels that are not used in the training process. It implies that ControlGAN can significantly contribute to the variety of generated samples.
Network embedding represents nodes in a continuous vector space and preserves structure information from the Network. Existing methods usually adopt a "one-size-fits-all" approach when concerning multi-scale structure information, such as first- and second-order proximity of nodes, ignoring the fact that different scales play different roles in the embedding learning. In this paper, we propose an Attention-based Adversarial Autoencoder Network Embedding(AAANE) framework, which promotes the collaboration of different scales and lets them vote for robust representations. The proposed AAANE consists of two components: 1) Attention-based autoencoder effectively capture the highly non-linear network structure, which can de-emphasize irrelevant scales during training. 2) An adversarial regularization guides the autoencoder learn robust representations by matching the posterior distribution of the latent embeddings to given prior distribution. This is the first attempt to introduce attention mechanisms to multi-scale network embedding. Experimental results on real-world networks show that our learned attention parameters are different for every network and the proposed approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches for network embedding.
We introduce an effective model to overcome the problem of mode collapse when training Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). Firstly, we propose a new generator objective that finds it better to tackle mode collapse. And, we apply an independent Autoencoders (AE) to constrain the generator and consider its reconstructed samples as "real" samples to slow down the convergence of discriminator that enables to reduce the gradient vanishing problem and stabilize the model. Secondly, from mappings between latent and data spaces provided by AE, we further regularize AE by the relative distance between the latent and data samples to explicitly prevent the generator falling into mode collapse setting. This idea comes when we find a new way to visualize the mode collapse on MNIST dataset. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to propose and apply successfully the relative distance of latent and data samples for stabilizing GAN. Thirdly, our proposed model, namely Generative Adversarial Autoencoder Networks (GAAN), is stable and has suffered from neither gradient vanishing nor mode collapse issues, as empirically demonstrated on synthetic, MNIST, MNIST-1K, CelebA and CIFAR-10 datasets. Experimental results show that our method can approximate well multi-modal distribution and achieve better results than state-of-the-art methods on these benchmark datasets. Our model implementation is published here: //github.com/tntrung/gaan
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples resulting from adding small-magnitude perturbations to inputs. Such adversarial examples can mislead DNNs to produce adversary-selected results. Different attack strategies have been proposed to generate adversarial examples, but how to produce them with high perceptual quality and more efficiently requires more research efforts. In this paper, we propose AdvGAN to generate adversarial examples with generative adversarial networks (GANs), which can learn and approximate the distribution of original instances. For AdvGAN, once the generator is trained, it can generate adversarial perturbations efficiently for any instance, so as to potentially accelerate adversarial training as defenses. We apply AdvGAN in both semi-whitebox and black-box attack settings. In semi-whitebox attacks, there is no need to access the original target model after the generator is trained, in contrast to traditional white-box attacks. In black-box attacks, we dynamically train a distilled model for the black-box model and optimize the generator accordingly. Adversarial examples generated by AdvGAN on different target models have high attack success rate under state-of-the-art defenses compared to other attacks. Our attack has placed the first with 92.76% accuracy on a public MNIST black-box attack challenge.
Unsupervised learning is of growing interest because it unlocks the potential held in vast amounts of unlabelled data to learn useful representations for inference. Autoencoders, a form of generative model, may be trained by learning to reconstruct unlabelled input data from a latent representation space. More robust representations may be produced by an autoencoder if it learns to recover clean input samples from corrupted ones. Representations may be further improved by introducing regularisation during training to shape the distribution of the encoded data in latent space. We suggest denoising adversarial autoencoders, which combine denoising and regularisation, shaping the distribution of latent space using adversarial training. We introduce a novel analysis that shows how denoising may be incorporated into the training and sampling of adversarial autoencoders. Experiments are performed to assess the contributions that denoising makes to the learning of representations for classification and sample synthesis. Our results suggest that autoencoders trained using a denoising criterion achieve higher classification performance, and can synthesise samples that are more consistent with the input data than those trained without a corruption process.