Adversarial training for neural networks has been in the limelight in recent years. The advancement in neural network architectures over the last decade has led to significant improvement in their performance. It sparked an interest in their deployment for real-time applications. This process initiated the need to understand the vulnerability of these models to adversarial attacks. It is instrumental in designing models that are robust against adversaries. Recent works have proposed novel techniques to counter the adversaries, most often sacrificing natural accuracy. Most suggest training with an adversarial version of the inputs, constantly moving away from the original distribution. The focus of our work is to use abstract certification to extract a subset of inputs for (hence we call it 'soft') adversarial training. We propose a training framework that can retain natural accuracy without sacrificing robustness in a constrained setting. Our framework specifically targets moderately critical applications which require a reasonable balance between robustness and accuracy. The results testify to the idea of soft adversarial training for the defense against adversarial attacks. At last, we propose the scope of future work for further improvement of this framework.
Recent attacks on Machine Learning (ML) models such as evasion attacks with adversarial examples and models stealing through extraction attacks pose several security and privacy threats. Prior work proposes to use adversarial training to secure models from adversarial examples that can evade the classification of a model and deteriorate its performance. However, this protection technique affects the model's decision boundary and its prediction probabilities, hence it might raise model privacy risks. In fact, a malicious user using only a query access to the prediction output of a model can extract it and obtain a high-accuracy and high-fidelity surrogate model. To have a greater extraction, these attacks leverage the prediction probabilities of the victim model. Indeed, all previous work on extraction attacks do not take into consideration the changes in the training process for security purposes. In this paper, we propose a framework to assess extraction attacks on adversarially trained models with vision datasets. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to perform such evaluation. Through an extensive empirical study, we demonstrate that adversarially trained models are more vulnerable to extraction attacks than models obtained under natural training circumstances. They can achieve up to $\times1.2$ higher accuracy and agreement with a fraction lower than $\times0.75$ of the queries. We additionally find that the adversarial robustness capability is transferable through extraction attacks, i.e., extracted Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) from robust models show an enhanced accuracy to adversarial examples compared to extracted DNNs from naturally trained (i.e. standard) models.
Vision Transformer (ViT), as a powerful alternative to Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), has received much attention. Recent work showed that ViTs are also vulnerable to adversarial examples like CNNs. To build robust ViTs, an intuitive way is to apply adversarial training since it has been shown as one of the most effective ways to accomplish robust CNNs. However, one major limitation of adversarial training is its heavy computational cost. The self-attention mechanism adopted by ViTs is a computationally intense operation whose expense increases quadratically with the number of input patches, making adversarial training on ViTs even more time-consuming. In this work, we first comprehensively study fast adversarial training on a variety of vision transformers and illustrate the relationship between the efficiency and robustness. Then, to expediate adversarial training on ViTs, we propose an efficient Attention Guided Adversarial Training mechanism. Specifically, relying on the specialty of self-attention, we actively remove certain patch embeddings of each layer with an attention-guided dropping strategy during adversarial training. The slimmed self-attention modules accelerate the adversarial training on ViTs significantly. With only 65\% of the fast adversarial training time, we match the state-of-the-art results on the challenging ImageNet benchmark.
Adversarial attacks provide a good way to study the robustness of deep learning models. One category of methods in transfer-based black-box attack utilizes several image transformation operations to improve the transferability of adversarial examples, which is effective, but fails to take the specific characteristic of the input image into consideration. In this work, we propose a novel architecture, called Adaptive Image Transformation Learner (AITL), which incorporates different image transformation operations into a unified framework to further improve the transferability of adversarial examples. Unlike the fixed combinational transformations used in existing works, our elaborately designed transformation learner adaptively selects the most effective combination of image transformations specific to the input image. Extensive experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that our method significantly improves the attack success rates on both normally trained models and defense models under various settings.
Machine learning models are trained to minimize the mean loss for a single metric, and thus typically do not consider fairness and robustness. Neglecting such metrics in training can make these models prone to fairness violations when training data are imbalanced or test distributions differ. This work introduces Fairness Optimized Reweighting via Meta-Learning (FORML), a training algorithm that balances fairness and robustness with accuracy by jointly learning training sample weights and neural network parameters. The approach increases model fairness by learning to balance the contributions from both over- and under-represented sub-groups through dynamic reweighting of the data learned from a user-specified held-out set representative of the distribution under which fairness is desired. FORML improves equality of opportunity fairness criteria on image classification tasks, reduces bias of corrupted labels, and facilitates building more fair datasets via data condensation. These improvements are achieved without pre-processing data or post-processing model outputs, without learning an additional weighting function, without changing model architecture, and while maintaining accuracy on the original predictive metric.
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.
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.
Since hardware resources are limited, the objective of training deep learning models is typically to maximize accuracy subject to the time and memory constraints of training and inference. We study the impact of model size in this setting, focusing on Transformer models for NLP tasks that are limited by compute: self-supervised pretraining and high-resource machine translation. We first show that even though smaller Transformer models execute faster per iteration, wider and deeper models converge in significantly fewer steps. Moreover, this acceleration in convergence typically outpaces the additional computational overhead of using larger models. Therefore, the most compute-efficient training strategy is to counterintuitively train extremely large models but stop after a small number of iterations. This leads to an apparent trade-off between the training efficiency of large Transformer models and the inference efficiency of small Transformer models. However, we show that large models are more robust to compression techniques such as quantization and pruning than small models. Consequently, one can get the best of both worlds: heavily compressed, large models achieve higher accuracy than lightly compressed, small models.
The field of few-shot learning has recently seen substantial advancements. Most of these advancements came from casting few-shot learning as a meta-learning problem. Model Agnostic Meta Learning or MAML is currently one of the best approaches for few-shot learning via meta-learning. MAML is simple, elegant and very powerful, however, it has a variety of issues, such as being very sensitive to neural network architectures, often leading to instability during training, requiring arduous hyperparameter searches to stabilize training and achieve high generalization and being very computationally expensive at both training and inference times. In this paper, we propose various modifications to MAML that not only stabilize the system, but also substantially improve the generalization performance, convergence speed and computational overhead of MAML, which we call MAML++.
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.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.