Variance in predictions across different trained models is a significant, under-explored source of error in fair classification. In practice, the variance on some data examples is so large that decisions can be effectively arbitrary. To investigate this problem, we take an experimental approach and make four overarching contributions: We 1) Define a metric called self-consistency, derived from variance, which we use as a proxy for measuring and reducing arbitrariness; 2) Develop an ensembling algorithm that abstains from classification when a prediction would be arbitrary; 3) Conduct the largest to-date empirical study of the role of variance (vis-a-vis self-consistency and arbitrariness) in fair classification; and, 4) Release a toolkit that makes the US Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) datasets easily usable for future research. Altogether, our experiments reveal shocking insights about the reliability of conclusions on benchmark datasets. Most fairness classification benchmarks are close-to-fair when taking into account the amount of arbitrariness present in predictions -- before we even try to apply common fairness interventions. This finding calls into question the practical utility of common algorithmic fairness methods, and in turn suggests that we should fundamentally reconsider how we choose to measure fairness in machine learning.
Evasion Attacks (EA) are used to test the robustness of trained neural networks by distorting input data to misguide the model into incorrect classifications. Creating these attacks is a challenging task, especially with the ever-increasing complexity of models and datasets. In this work, we introduce a self-supervised, computationally economical method for generating adversarial examples, designed for the unseen black-box setting. Adapting techniques from representation learning, our method generates on-manifold EAs that are encouraged to resemble the data distribution. These attacks are comparable in effectiveness compared to the state-of-the-art when attacking the model trained on, but are significantly more effective when attacking unseen models, as the attacks are more related to the data rather than the model itself. Our experiments consistently demonstrate the method is effective across various models, unseen data categories, and even defended models, suggesting a significant role for on-manifold EAs when targeting unseen models.
Text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated an unparalleled ability to generate high-quality, diverse images from a textual prompt. However, the internal representations learned by these models remain an enigma. In this work, we present Conceptor, a novel method to interpret the internal representation of a textual concept by a diffusion model. This interpretation is obtained by decomposing the concept into a small set of human-interpretable textual elements. Applied over the state-of-the-art Stable Diffusion model, Conceptor reveals non-trivial structures in the representations of concepts. For example, we find surprising visual connections between concepts, that transcend their textual semantics. We additionally discover concepts that rely on mixtures of exemplars, biases, renowned artistic styles, or a simultaneous fusion of multiple meanings of the concept. Through a large battery of experiments, we demonstrate Conceptor's ability to provide meaningful, robust, and faithful decompositions for a wide variety of abstract, concrete, and complex textual concepts, while allowing to naturally connect each decomposition element to its corresponding visual impact on the generated images. Our code will be available at: //hila-chefer.github.io/Conceptor/
Self-supervised learning (SSL) models have recently demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks, including image segmentation. This study delves into the emergent characteristics of the Self-Distillation with No Labels (DINO) algorithm and its application to Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. We pre-train a vision transformer (ViT)-based DINO model using unlabeled SAR data, and later fine-tune the model to predict high-resolution land cover maps. We rigorously evaluate the utility of attention maps generated by the ViT backbone, and compare them with the model's token embedding space. We observe a small improvement in model performance with pre-training compared to training from scratch, and discuss the limitations and opportunities of SSL for remote sensing and land cover segmentation. Beyond small performance increases, we show that ViT attention maps hold great intrinsic value for remote sensing, and could provide useful inputs to other algorithms. With this, our work lays the ground-work for bigger and better SSL models for Earth Observation.
Frequent modifications of unit test cases are inevitable due to software's continuous underlying changes in source code, design, and requirements. Since manually maintaining software test suites is tedious, timely, and costly, automating the process of generation and maintenance of test units will significantly impact the effectiveness and efficiency of software testing processes. To this end, we propose an automated approach which exploits both structural and semantic properties of source code methods and test cases to recommend the most relevant and useful unit tests to the developers. The proposed approach initially trains a neural network to transform method-level source code, as well as unit tests, into distributed representations (embedded vectors) while preserving the importance of the structure in the code. Retrieving the semantic and structural properties of a given method, the approach computes cosine similarity between the method's embedding and the previously-embedded training instances. Further, according to the similarity scores between the embedding vectors, the model identifies the closest methods of embedding and the associated unit tests as the most similar recommendations. The results on the Methods2Test dataset showed that, while there is no guarantee to have similar relevant test cases for the group of similar methods, the proposed approach extracts the most similar existing test cases for a given method in the dataset, and evaluations show that recommended test cases decrease the developers' effort to generating expected test cases.
Large language models (LLMs), known for their capability in understanding and following instructions, are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Researchers have found that current commercial LLMs either fail to be "harmless" by presenting unethical answers, or fail to be "helpful" by refusing to offer meaningful answers when faced with adversarial queries. To strike a balance between being helpful and harmless, we design a moving target defense (MTD) enhanced LLM system. The system aims to deliver non-toxic answers that align with outputs from multiple model candidates, making them more robust against adversarial attacks. We design a query and output analysis model to filter out unsafe or non-responsive answers. %to achieve the two objectives of randomly selecting outputs from different LLMs. We evaluate over 8 most recent chatbot models with state-of-the-art adversarial queries. Our MTD-enhanced LLM system reduces the attack success rate from 37.5\% to 0\%. Meanwhile, it decreases the response refusal rate from 50\% to 0\%.
A method is introduced for approximate marginal likelihood inference via adaptive Gaussian quadrature in mixed models with a single grouping factor. The core technical contribution is an algorithm for computing the exact gradient of the approximate log marginal likelihood. This leads to efficient maximum likelihood via quasi-Newton optimization that is demonstrated to be faster than existing approaches based on finite-differenced gradients or derivative-free optimization. The method is specialized to Bernoulli mixed models with multivariate, correlated Gaussian random effects; here computations are performed using an inverse log-Cholesky parameterization of the Gaussian density that involves no matrix decomposition during model fitting, while Wald confidence intervals are provided for variance parameters on the original scale. Simulations give evidence of these intervals attaining nominal coverage if enough quadrature points are used, for data comprised of a large number of very small groups exhibiting large between-group heterogeneity. In contrast, the Laplace approximation is shown to give especially poor coverage and high bias for data comprised of a large number of small groups. Adaptive quadrature mitigates this, and the methods in this paper improve the computational feasibility of this more accurate method. All results may be reproduced using code available at \url{//github.com/awstringer1/aghmm-paper-code}.
Deep models trained in supervised mode have achieved remarkable success on a variety of tasks. When labeled samples are limited, self-supervised learning (SSL) is emerging as a new paradigm for making use of large amounts of unlabeled samples. SSL has achieved promising performance on natural language and image learning tasks. Recently, there is a trend to extend such success to graph data using graph neural networks (GNNs). In this survey, we provide a unified review of different ways of training GNNs using SSL. Specifically, we categorize SSL methods into contrastive and predictive models. In either category, we provide a unified framework for methods as well as how these methods differ in each component under the framework. Our unified treatment of SSL methods for GNNs sheds light on the similarities and differences of various methods, setting the stage for developing new methods and algorithms. We also summarize different SSL settings and the corresponding datasets used in each setting. To facilitate methodological development and empirical comparison, we develop a standardized testbed for SSL in GNNs, including implementations of common baseline methods, datasets, and evaluation metrics.
Sampling methods (e.g., node-wise, layer-wise, or subgraph) has become an indispensable strategy to speed up training large-scale Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, existing sampling methods are mostly based on the graph structural information and ignore the dynamicity of optimization, which leads to high variance in estimating the stochastic gradients. The high variance issue can be very pronounced in extremely large graphs, where it results in slow convergence and poor generalization. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the variance of sampling methods and show that, due to the composite structure of empirical risk, the variance of any sampling method can be decomposed into \textit{embedding approximation variance} in the forward stage and \textit{stochastic gradient variance} in the backward stage that necessities mitigating both types of variance to obtain faster convergence rate. We propose a decoupled variance reduction strategy that employs (approximate) gradient information to adaptively sample nodes with minimal variance, and explicitly reduces the variance introduced by embedding approximation. We show theoretically and empirically that the proposed method, even with smaller mini-batch sizes, enjoys a faster convergence rate and entails a better generalization compared to the existing methods.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.