While it has long been empirically observed that adversarial robustness may be at odds with standard accuracy and may have further disparate impacts on different classes, it remains an open question to what extent such observations hold and how the class imbalance plays a role within. In this paper, we attempt to understand this question of accuracy disparity by taking a closer look at linear classifiers under a Gaussian mixture model. We decompose the impact of adversarial robustness into two parts: an inherent effect that will degrade the standard accuracy on all classes, and the other caused by the class imbalance ratio, which will increase the accuracy disparity compared to standard training. Furthermore, we also extend our model to the general family of stable distributions. We demonstrate that while the constraint of adversarial robustness consistently degrades the standard accuracy in the balanced class setting, the class imbalance ratio plays a fundamentally different role in accuracy disparity compared to the Gaussian case, due to the heavy tail of the stable distribution. We additionally perform experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets. The empirical results not only corroborate our theoretical findings, but also suggest that the implications may extend to nonlinear models over real-world datasets.
Adversarial nets have proved to be powerful in various domains including generative modeling (GANs), transfer learning, and fairness. However, successfully training adversarial nets using first-order methods remains a major challenge. Typically, careful choices of the learning rates are needed to maintain the delicate balance between the competing networks. In this paper, we design a novel learning rate scheduler that dynamically adapts the learning rate of the adversary to maintain the right balance. The scheduler is driven by the fact that the loss of an ideal adversarial net is a constant known a priori. The scheduler is thus designed to keep the loss of the optimized adversarial net close to that of an ideal network. We run large-scale experiments to study the effectiveness of the scheduler on two popular applications: GANs for image generation and adversarial nets for domain adaptation. Our experiments indicate that adversarial nets trained with the scheduler are less likely to diverge and require significantly less tuning. For example, on CelebA, a GAN with the scheduler requires only one-tenth of the tuning budget needed without a scheduler. Moreover, the scheduler leads to statistically significant improvements in model quality, reaching up to $27\%$ in Frechet Inception Distance for image generation and $3\%$ in test accuracy for domain adaptation.
As machine learning (ML) algorithms are increasingly used in high-stakes applications, concerns have arisen that they may be biased against certain social groups. Although many approaches have been proposed to make ML models fair, they typically rely on the assumption that data distributions in training and deployment are identical. Unfortunately, this is commonly violated in practice and a model that is fair during training may lead to an unexpected outcome during its deployment. Although the problem of designing robust ML models under dataset shifts has been widely studied, most existing works focus only on the transfer of accuracy. In this paper, we study the transfer of both fairness and accuracy under domain generalization where the data at test time may be sampled from never-before-seen domains. We first develop theoretical bounds on the unfairness and expected loss at deployment, and then derive sufficient conditions under which fairness and accuracy can be perfectly transferred via invariant representation learning. Guided by this, we design a learning algorithm such that fair ML models learned with training data still have high fairness and accuracy when deployment environments change. Experiments on real-world data validate the proposed algorithm. Model implementation is available at //github.com/pth1993/FATDM.
Deep neural networks are widely known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples, especially showing significantly poor performance on adversarial examples generated under the white-box setting. However, most white-box attack methods rely heavily on the target model and quickly get stuck in local optima, resulting in poor adversarial transferability. The momentum-based methods and their variants are proposed to escape the local optima for better transferability. In this work, we notice that the transferability of adversarial examples generated by the iterative fast gradient sign method (I-FGSM) exhibits a decreasing trend when increasing the number of iterations. Motivated by this finding, we argue that the information of adversarial perturbations near the benign sample, especially the direction, benefits more on the transferability. Thus, we propose a novel strategy, which uses the Scheduled step size and the Dual example (SD), to fully utilize the adversarial information near the benign sample. Our proposed strategy can be easily integrated with existing adversarial attack methods for better adversarial transferability. Empirical evaluations on the standard ImageNet dataset demonstrate that our proposed method can significantly enhance the transferability of existing adversarial attacks.
We study a security threat to adversarial multi-armed bandits, in which an attacker perturbs the loss or reward signal to control the behavior of the victim bandit player. We show that the attacker is able to mislead any no-regret adversarial bandit algorithm into selecting a suboptimal target arm in every but sublinear (T-o(T)) number of rounds, while incurring only sublinear (o(T)) cumulative attack cost. This result implies critical security concern in real-world bandit-based systems, e.g., in online recommendation, an attacker might be able to hijack the recommender system and promote a desired product. Our proposed attack algorithms require knowledge of only the regret rate, thus are agnostic to the concrete bandit algorithm employed by the victim player. We also derived a theoretical lower bound on the cumulative attack cost that any victim-agnostic attack algorithm must incur. The lower bound matches the upper bound achieved by our attack, which shows that our attack is asymptotically optimal.
Language models have steadily increased in size over the past few years. They achieve a high level of performance on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as question answering and summarization. Large language models (LLMs) have been used for generation and can now output human-like text. Due to this, there are other downstream tasks in the realm of dialog that can now harness the LLMs' language understanding capabilities. Dialog evaluation is one task that this paper will explore. It concentrates on prompting with LLMs: BLOOM, OPT, GPT-3, Flan-T5, InstructDial and TNLGv2. The paper shows that the choice of datasets used for training a model contributes to how well it performs on a task as well as on how the prompt should be structured. Specifically, the more diverse and relevant the group of datasets that a model is trained on, the better dialog evaluation performs. This paper also investigates how the number of examples in the prompt and the type of example selection used affect the model's performance.
Recent progress in empirical and certified robustness promises to deliver reliable and deployable Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Despite that success, most existing evaluations of DNN robustness have been done on images sampled from the same distribution on which the model was trained. However, in the real world, DNNs may be deployed in dynamic environments that exhibit significant distribution shifts. In this work, we take a first step towards thoroughly investigating the interplay between empirical and certified adversarial robustness on one hand and domain generalization on another. To do so, we train robust models on multiple domains and evaluate their accuracy and robustness on an unseen domain. We observe that: (1) both empirical and certified robustness generalize to unseen domains, and (2) the level of generalizability does not correlate well with input visual similarity, measured by the FID between source and target domains. We also extend our study to cover a real-world medical application, in which adversarial augmentation significantly boosts the generalization of robustness with minimal effect on clean data accuracy.
We propose a goodness-of-fit measure for probability densities modeling observations with varying dimensionality, such as text documents of differing lengths or variable-length sequences. The proposed measure is an instance of the kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD), which has been used to construct goodness-of-fit tests for unnormalized densities. The KSD is defined by its Stein operator: current operators used in testing apply to fixed-dimensional spaces. As our main contribution, we extend the KSD to the variable-dimension setting by identifying appropriate Stein operators, and propose a novel KSD goodness-of-fit test. As with the previous variants, the proposed KSD does not require the density to be normalized, allowing the evaluation of a large class of models. Our test is shown to perform well in practice on discrete sequential data benchmarks.
While existing work in robust deep learning has focused on small pixel-level $\ell_p$ norm-based perturbations, this may not account for perturbations encountered in several real world settings. In many such cases although test data might not be available, broad specifications about the types of perturbations (such as an unknown degree of rotation) may be known. We consider a setup where robustness is expected over an unseen test domain that is not i.i.d. but deviates from the training domain. While this deviation may not be exactly known, its broad characterization is specified a priori, in terms of attributes. We propose an adversarial training approach which learns to generate new samples so as to maximize exposure of the classifier to the attributes-space, without having access to the data from the test domain. Our adversarial training solves a min-max optimization problem, with the inner maximization generating adversarial perturbations, and the outer minimization finding model parameters by optimizing the loss on adversarial perturbations generated from the inner maximization. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach on three types of naturally occurring perturbations -- object-related shifts, geometric transformations, and common image corruptions. Our approach enables deep neural networks to be robust against a wide range of naturally occurring perturbations. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach by showing the robustness gains of deep neural networks trained using our adversarial training on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and a new variant of the CLEVR dataset.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently achieved impressive results for many real-world applications, and many GAN variants have emerged with improvements in sample quality and training stability. However, they have not been well visualized or understood. How does a GAN represent our visual world internally? What causes the artifacts in GAN results? How do architectural choices affect GAN learning? Answering such questions could enable us to develop new insights and better models. In this work, we present an analytic framework to visualize and understand GANs at the unit-, object-, and scene-level. We first identify a group of interpretable units that are closely related to object concepts using a segmentation-based network dissection method. Then, we quantify the causal effect of interpretable units by measuring the ability of interventions to control objects in the output. We examine the contextual relationship between these units and their surroundings by inserting the discovered object concepts into new images. We show several practical applications enabled by our framework, from comparing internal representations across different layers, models, and datasets, to improving GANs by locating and removing artifact-causing units, to interactively manipulating objects in a scene. We provide open source interpretation tools to help researchers and practitioners better understand their GAN models.
There is a recent large and growing interest in generative adversarial networks (GANs), which offer powerful features for generative modeling, density estimation, and energy function learning. GANs are difficult to train and evaluate but are capable of creating amazingly realistic, though synthetic, image data. Ideas stemming from GANs such as adversarial losses are creating research opportunities for other challenges such as domain adaptation. In this paper, we look at the field of GANs with emphasis on these areas of emerging research. To provide background for adversarial techniques, we survey the field of GANs, looking at the original formulation, training variants, evaluation methods, and extensions. Then we survey recent work on transfer learning, focusing on comparing different adversarial domain adaptation methods. Finally, we take a look forward to identify open research directions for GANs and domain adaptation, including some promising applications such as sensor-based human behavior modeling.