Current deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where adversarial perturbations to the inputs can change or manipulate classification. To defend against such attacks, an effective and popular approach, known as adversarial training (AT), has been shown to mitigate the negative impact of adversarial attacks by virtue of a min-max robust training method. While effective, it remains unclear whether it can successfully be adapted to the distributed learning context. The power of distributed optimization over multiple machines enables us to scale up robust training over large models and datasets. Spurred by that, we propose distributed adversarial training (DAT), a large-batch adversarial training framework implemented over multiple machines. We show that DAT is general, which supports training over labeled and unlabeled data, multiple types of attack generation methods, and gradient compression operations favored for distributed optimization. Theoretically, we provide, under standard conditions in the optimization theory, the convergence rate of DAT to the first-order stationary points in general non-convex settings. Empirically, we demonstrate that DAT either matches or outperforms state-of-the-art robust accuracies and achieves a graceful training speedup (e.g., on ResNet-50 under ImageNet). Codes are available at //github.com/dat-2022/dat.
Deep Learning-based image synthesis techniques have been applied in healthcare research for generating medical images to support open research and augment medical datasets. Training generative adversarial neural networks (GANs) usually require large amounts of training data. Federated learning (FL) provides a way of training a central model using distributed data while keeping raw data locally. However, given that the FL server cannot access the raw data, it is vulnerable to backdoor attacks, an adversarial by poisoning training data. Most backdoor attack strategies focus on classification models and centralized domains. It is still an open question if the existing backdoor attacks can affect GAN training and, if so, how to defend against the attack in the FL setting. In this work, we investigate the overlooked issue of backdoor attacks in federated GANs (FedGANs). The success of this attack is subsequently determined to be the result of some local discriminators overfitting the poisoned data and corrupting the local GAN equilibrium, which then further contaminates other clients when averaging the generator's parameters and yields high generator loss. Therefore, we proposed FedDetect, an efficient and effective way of defending against the backdoor attack in the FL setting, which allows the server to detect the client's adversarial behavior based on their losses and block the malicious clients. Our extensive experiments on two medical datasets with different modalities demonstrate the backdoor attack on FedGANs can result in synthetic images with low fidelity. After detecting and suppressing the detected malicious clients using the proposed defense strategy, we show that FedGANs can synthesize high-quality medical datasets (with labels) for data augmentation to improve classification models' performance.
Performance of machine learning models may differ between training and deployment for many reasons. For instance, model performance can change between environments due to changes in data quality, observing a different population than the one in training, or changes in the relationship between labels and features. These manifest as changes to the underlying data generating mechanisms, and thereby result in distribution shifts across environments. Attributing performance changes to specific shifts, such as covariate or concept shifts, is critical for identifying sources of model failures, and for taking mitigating actions that ensure robust models. In this work, we introduce the problem of attributing performance differences between environments to shifts in the underlying data generating mechanisms. We formulate the problem as a cooperative game and derive an importance weighting method for computing the value of a coalition (or a set) of distributions. The contribution of each distribution to the total performance change is then quantified as its Shapley value. We demonstrate the correctness and utility of our method on two synthetic datasets and two real-world case studies, showing its effectiveness in attributing performance changes to a wide range of distribution shifts.
We propose to extend the concept of private information retrieval by allowing for distortion in the retrieval process and relaxing the perfect privacy requirement at the same time. In particular, we study the trade-off between download rate, distortion, and user privacy leakage, and show that in the limit of large file sizes this trade-off can be captured via a novel information-theoretical formulation for datasets with a known distribution. Moreover, for scenarios where the statistics of the dataset is unknown, we propose a new deep learning framework by leveraging a generative adversarial network approach, which allows the user to learn efficient schemes from the data itself. We evaluate the performance of the scheme on a synthetic Gaussian dataset as well as on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and LSUN datasets. For the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and LSUN datasets, the data-driven approach significantly outperforms a nonlearning-based scheme which combines source coding with the download of multiple files.
The existence of adversarial examples brings huge concern for people to apply Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in safety-critical tasks. However, how to generate adversarial examples with categorical data is an important problem but lack of extensive exploration. Previously established methods leverage greedy search method, which can be very time-consuming to conduct successful attack. This also limits the development of adversarial training and potential defenses for categorical data. To tackle this problem, we propose Probabilistic Categorical Adversarial Attack (PCAA), which transfers the discrete optimization problem to a continuous problem that can be solved efficiently by Projected Gradient Descent. In our paper, we theoretically analyze its optimality and time complexity to demonstrate its significant advantage over current greedy based attacks. Moreover, based on our attack, we propose an efficient adversarial training framework. Through a comprehensive empirical study, we justify the effectiveness of our proposed attack and defense algorithms.
Deep Learning (DL) is the most widely used tool in the contemporary field of computer vision. Its ability to accurately solve complex problems is employed in vision research to learn deep neural models for a variety of tasks, including security critical applications. However, it is now known that DL is vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can manipulate its predictions by introducing visually imperceptible perturbations in images and videos. Since the discovery of this phenomenon in 2013~[1], it has attracted significant attention of researchers from multiple sub-fields of machine intelligence. In [2], we reviewed the contributions made by the computer vision community in adversarial attacks on deep learning (and their defenses) until the advent of year 2018. Many of those contributions have inspired new directions in this area, which has matured significantly since witnessing the first generation methods. Hence, as a legacy sequel of [2], this literature review focuses on the advances in this area since 2018. To ensure authenticity, we mainly consider peer-reviewed contributions published in the prestigious sources of computer vision and machine learning research. Besides a comprehensive literature review, the article also provides concise definitions of technical terminologies for non-experts in this domain. Finally, this article discusses challenges and future outlook of this direction based on the literature reviewed herein and [2].
Deep graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved excellent results on various tasks on increasingly large graph datasets with millions of nodes and edges. However, memory complexity has become a major obstacle when training deep GNNs for practical applications due to the immense number of nodes, edges, and intermediate activations. To improve the scalability of GNNs, prior works propose smart graph sampling or partitioning strategies to train GNNs with a smaller set of nodes or sub-graphs. In this work, we study reversible connections, group convolutions, weight tying, and equilibrium models to advance the memory and parameter efficiency of GNNs. We find that reversible connections in combination with deep network architectures enable the training of overparameterized GNNs that significantly outperform existing methods on multiple datasets. Our models RevGNN-Deep (1001 layers with 80 channels each) and RevGNN-Wide (448 layers with 224 channels each) were both trained on a single commodity GPU and achieve an ROC-AUC of $87.74 \pm 0.13$ and $88.14 \pm 0.15$ on the ogbn-proteins dataset. To the best of our knowledge, RevGNN-Deep is the deepest GNN in the literature by one order of magnitude. Please visit our project website //www.deepgcns.org/arch/gnn1000 for more information.
Normalization is known to help the optimization of deep neural networks. Curiously, different architectures require specialized normalization methods. In this paper, we study what normalization is effective for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). First, we adapt and evaluate the existing methods from other domains to GNNs. Faster convergence is achieved with InstanceNorm compared to BatchNorm and LayerNorm. We provide an explanation by showing that InstanceNorm serves as a preconditioner for GNNs, but such preconditioning effect is weaker with BatchNorm due to the heavy batch noise in graph datasets. Second, we show that the shift operation in InstanceNorm results in an expressiveness degradation of GNNs for highly regular graphs. We address this issue by proposing GraphNorm with a learnable shift. Empirically, GNNs with GraphNorm converge faster compared to GNNs using other normalization. GraphNorm also improves the generalization of GNNs, achieving better performance on graph classification 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.
Deep learning models on graphs have achieved remarkable performance in various graph analysis tasks, e.g., node classification, link prediction and graph clustering. However, they expose uncertainty and unreliability against the well-designed inputs, i.e., adversarial examples. Accordingly, various studies have emerged for both attack and defense addressed in different graph analysis tasks, leading to the arms race in graph adversarial learning. For instance, the attacker has poisoning and evasion attack, and the defense group correspondingly has preprocessing- and adversarial- based methods. Despite the booming works, there still lacks a unified problem definition and a comprehensive review. To bridge this gap, we investigate and summarize the existing works on graph adversarial learning tasks systemically. Specifically, we survey and unify the existing works w.r.t. attack and defense in graph analysis tasks, and give proper definitions and taxonomies at the same time. Besides, we emphasize the importance of related evaluation metrics, and investigate and summarize them comprehensively. Hopefully, our works can serve as a reference for the relevant researchers, thus providing assistance for their studies. More details of our works are available at //github.com/gitgiter/Graph-Adversarial-Learning.
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