We study a fundamental question concerning adversarial noise models in statistical problems where the algorithm receives i.i.d. draws from a distribution $\mathcal{D}$. The definitions of these adversaries specify the type of allowable corruptions (noise model) as well as when these corruptions can be made (adaptivity); the latter differentiates between oblivious adversaries that can only corrupt the distribution $\mathcal{D}$ and adaptive adversaries that can have their corruptions depend on the specific sample $S$ that is drawn from $\mathcal{D}$. In this work, we investigate whether oblivious adversaries are effectively equivalent to adaptive adversaries, across all noise models studied in the literature. Specifically, can the behavior of an algorithm $\mathcal{A}$ in the presence of oblivious adversaries always be well-approximated by that of an algorithm $\mathcal{A}'$ in the presence of adaptive adversaries? Our first result shows that this is indeed the case for the broad class of statistical query algorithms, under all reasonable noise models. We then show that in the specific case of additive noise, this equivalence holds for all algorithms. Finally, we map out an approach towards proving this statement in its fullest generality, for all algorithms and under all reasonable noise models.
In this paper, we propose a variationally consistent technique for decreasing the maximum eigenfrequencies of structural dynamics related finite element formulations. Our approach is based on adding a symmetric positive-definite term to the mass matrix that follows from the integral of the traction jump across element boundaries. The added term is weighted by a small factor, for which we derive a suitable, and simple, element-local parameter choice. For linear problems, we show that our mass-scaling method produces no adverse effects in terms of spatial accuracy and orders of convergence. We illustrate these properties in one, two and three spatial dimension, for quadrilateral elements and triangular elements, and for up to fourth order polynomials basis functions. To extend the method to non-linear problems, we introduce a linear approximation and show that a sizeable increase in critical time-step size can be achieved while only causing minor (even beneficial) influences on the dynamic response.
We introduce the notion of classical fractional query algorithms, which generalize decision trees in the average-case setting, and can potentially perform better than them. We show that the limiting run-time complexity of a natural class of these algorithms obeys the non-linear partial differential equation $\min_{k}\partial^{2}u/\partial x_{k}^{2}=-2$, and that the individual bit revealment satisfies the Schramm-Steif bound for Fourier weight, connecting noise sensitivity with PDEs. We discuss relations with other decision tree results.
This work studies anomaly detection under differential privacy with Gaussian perturbation using both statistical and information-theoretic tools. In our setting, the adversary aims to modify the differentially private information of a statistical dataset by inserting additional data without being detected by using the differential privacy to her/his own benefit. To this end, firstly via hypothesis testing, we characterize a statistical threshold for the adversary, which balances the privacy budget and the induced bias (the impact of the attack) in order to remain undetected. In addition, we establish the privacy-distortion tradeoff in the sense of the well-known rate-distortion function for the Gaussian mechanism by using an information-theoretic approach and present an upper bound on the variance of the attacker's additional data as a function of the sensitivity and the original data's second-order statistics. Lastly, we introduce a new privacy metric based on Chernoff information for classifying adversaries under differential privacy as a stronger alternative for the Gaussian mechanism. Analytical results are supported by numerical evaluations.
We demonstrate the effectiveness of an adaptive explicit Euler method for the approximate solution of the Cox-Ingersoll-Ross model. This relies on a class of path-bounded timestepping strategies which work by reducing the stepsize as solutions approach a neighbourhood of zero. The method is hybrid in the sense that a convergent backstop method is invoked if the timestep becomes too small, or to prevent solutions from overshooting zero and becoming negative. Under parameter constraints that imply Feller's condition, we prove that such a scheme is strongly convergent, of order at least 1/2. Control of the strong error is important for multi-level Monte Carlo techniques. Under Feller's condition we also prove that the probability of ever needing the backstop method to prevent a negative value can be made arbitrarily small. Numerically, we compare this adaptive method to fixed step implicit and explicit schemes, and a novel semi-implicit adaptive variant. We observe that the adaptive approach leads to methods that are competitive in a domain that extends beyond Feller's condition, indicating suitability for the modelling of stochastic volatility in Heston-type asset models.
The quality of learning generally improves with the scale and diversity of data. Companies and institutions can therefore benefit from building models over shared data. Many cloud and blockchain platforms, as well as government initiatives, are interested in providing this type of service. These cooperative efforts face a challenge, which we call ``exclusivity attacks''. A firm can share distorted data, so that it learns the best model fit, but is also able to mislead others. We study protocols for long-term interactions and their vulnerability to these attacks, in particular for regression and clustering tasks. We conclude that the choice of protocol, as well as the number of Sybil identities an attacker may control, is material to vulnerability.
The classical Smagorinsky model's solution is an approximation to a (resolved) mean velocity. Since it is an eddy viscosity model, it cannot represent a flow of energy from unresolved fluctuations to the (resolved) mean velocity. This model has recently been modified to incorporate this flow and still be well-posed. Herein we first develop some basic properties of the modified model. Next, we perform a complete numerical analysis of two algorithms for its approximation. They are tested and proven to be effective.
We study sparse linear regression over a network of agents, modeled as an undirected graph and no server node. The estimation of the $s$-sparse parameter is formulated as a constrained LASSO problem wherein each agent owns a subset of the $N$ total observations. We analyze the convergence rate and statistical guarantees of a distributed projected gradient tracking-based algorithm under high-dimensional scaling, allowing the ambient dimension $d$ to grow with (and possibly exceed) the sample size $N$. Our theory shows that, under standard notions of restricted strong convexity and smoothness of the loss functions, suitable conditions on the network connectivity and algorithm tuning, the distributed algorithm converges globally at a {\it linear} rate to an estimate that is within the centralized {\it statistical precision} of the model, $O(s\log d/N)$. When $s\log d/N=o(1)$, a condition necessary for statistical consistency, an $\varepsilon$-optimal solution is attained after $\mathcal{O}(\kappa \log (1/\varepsilon))$ gradient computations and $O (\kappa/(1-\rho) \log (1/\varepsilon))$ communication rounds, where $\kappa$ is the restricted condition number of the loss function and $\rho$ measures the network connectivity. The computation cost matches that of the centralized projected gradient algorithm despite having data distributed; whereas the communication rounds reduce as the network connectivity improves. Overall, our study reveals interesting connections between statistical efficiency, network connectivity \& topology, and convergence rate in high dimensions.
Backdoor attacks (BAs) are an emerging threat to deep neural network classifiers. A victim classifier will predict to an attacker-desired target class whenever a test sample is embedded with the same backdoor pattern (BP) that was used to poison the classifier's training set. Detecting whether a classifier is backdoor attacked is not easy in practice, especially when the defender is, e.g., a downstream user without access to the classifier's training set. This challenge is addressed here by a reverse-engineering defense (RED), which has been shown to yield state-of-the-art performance in several domains. However, existing REDs are not applicable when there are only {\it two classes} or when {\it multiple attacks} are present. These scenarios are first studied in the current paper, under the practical constraints that the defender neither has access to the classifier's training set nor to supervision from clean reference classifiers trained for the same domain. We propose a detection framework based on BP reverse-engineering and a novel {\it expected transferability} (ET) statistic. We show that our ET statistic is effective {\it using the same detection threshold}, irrespective of the classification domain, the attack configuration, and the BP reverse-engineering algorithm that is used. The excellent performance of our method is demonstrated on six benchmark datasets. Notably, our detection framework is also applicable to multi-class scenarios with multiple attacks.
The Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) is one of the most used unsupervised machine learning models. But although the default choice of a Gaussian distribution for both the prior and posterior represents a mathematically convenient distribution often leading to competitive results, we show that this parameterization fails to model data with a latent hyperspherical structure. To address this issue we propose using a von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution instead, leading to a hyperspherical latent space. Through a series of experiments we show how such a hyperspherical VAE, or $\mathcal{S}$-VAE, is more suitable for capturing data with a hyperspherical latent structure, while outperforming a normal, $\mathcal{N}$-VAE, in low dimensions on other data types.
Asynchronous distributed machine learning solutions have proven very effective so far, but always assuming perfectly functioning workers. In practice, some of the workers can however exhibit Byzantine behavior, caused by hardware failures, software bugs, corrupt data, or even malicious attacks. We introduce \emph{Kardam}, the first distributed asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm that copes with Byzantine workers. Kardam consists of two complementary components: a filtering and a dampening component. The first is scalar-based and ensures resilience against $\frac{1}{3}$ Byzantine workers. Essentially, this filter leverages the Lipschitzness of cost functions and acts as a self-stabilizer against Byzantine workers that would attempt to corrupt the progress of SGD. The dampening component bounds the convergence rate by adjusting to stale information through a generic gradient weighting scheme. We prove that Kardam guarantees almost sure convergence in the presence of asynchrony and Byzantine behavior, and we derive its convergence rate. We evaluate Kardam on the CIFAR-100 and EMNIST datasets and measure its overhead with respect to non Byzantine-resilient solutions. We empirically show that Kardam does not introduce additional noise to the learning procedure but does induce a slowdown (the cost of Byzantine resilience) that we both theoretically and empirically show to be less than $f/n$, where $f$ is the number of Byzantine failures tolerated and $n$ the total number of workers. Interestingly, we also empirically observe that the dampening component is interesting in its own right for it enables to build an SGD algorithm that outperforms alternative staleness-aware asynchronous competitors in environments with honest workers.