arXiv subjects

Asja Fischer

Publications and source records attributed to Asja Fischer.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Can LLMs Explain Themselves Counterfactually?

Explanations are an important tool for gaining insights into the behavior of ML models, calibrating user trust and ensuring regulatory compliance. Past few years have seen a flurry of post-hoc methods for generating model explanations, many of which involve computing model gradients or solving specially designed optimization problems. However, owing to the remarkable reasoning abilities of Large Language Model (LLMs), self-explanation, that is, prompting the model to explain its outputs has recently emerged as a new paradigm. In this work, we study a specific type of self-explanations, self-generated counterfactual explanations (SCEs). We design tests for measuring the efficacy of LLMs in generating SCEs. Analysis over various LLM families, model sizes, temperature settings, and datasets reveals that LLMs sometimes struggle to generate SCEs. Even when they do, their prediction often does not agree with their own counterfactual reasoning.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

On the Challenges and Opportunities in Generative AI

The field of deep generative modeling has grown rapidly in the last few years. With the availability of massive amounts of training data coupled with advances in scalable unsupervised learning paradigms, recent large-scale generative models show tremendous promise in synthesizing high-resolution images and text, as well as structured data such as videos and molecules. However, we argue that current large-scale generative AI models exhibit several fundamental shortcomings that hinder their widespread adoption across domains. In this work, our objective is to identify these issues and highlight key unresolved challenges in modern generative AI paradigms that should be addressed to further enhance their capabilities, versatility, and reliability. By identifying these challenges, we aim to provide researchers with insights for exploring fruitful research directions, thus fostering the development of more robust and accessible generative AI solutions.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Towards an Optimal Control Perspective of ResNet Training

We propose a training formulation for ResNets reflecting an optimal control problem that is applicable for standard architectures and general loss functions. We suggest bridging both worlds via penalizing intermediate outputs of hidden states corresponding to stage cost terms in optimal control. For standard ResNets, we obtain intermediate outputs by propagating the state through the subsequent skip connections and the output layer. We demonstrate that our training dynamic biases the weights of the unnecessary deeper residual layers to vanish. This indicates the potential for a theory-grounded layer pruning strategy.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

RAID: A Dataset for Testing the Adversarial Robustness of AI-Generated Image Detectors

AI-generated images have reached a quality level at which humans are incapable of reliably distinguishing them from real images. To counteract the inherent risk of fraud and disinformation, the detection of AI-generated images is a pressing challenge and an active research topic. While many of the presented methods claim to achieve high detection accuracy, they are usually evaluated under idealized conditions. In particular, the adversarial robustness is often neglected, potentially due to a lack of awareness or the substantial effort required to conduct a comprehensive robustness analysis. In this work, we tackle this problem by providing a simpler means to assess the robustness of AI-generated image detectors. We present RAID (Robust evaluation of AI-generated image Detectors), a dataset of 72k diverse and highly transferable adversarial examples. The dataset is created by running attacks against an ensemble of seven state-of-the-art detectors and images generated by four different text-to-image models. Extensive experiments show that our methodology generates adversarial images that transfer with a high success rate to unseen detectors, which can be used to quickly provide an approximate yet still reliable estimate of a detector's adversarial robustness. Our findings indicate that current state-of-the-art AI-generated image detectors can be easily deceived by adversarial examples, highlighting the critical need for the development of more robust methods. We release our dataset at https://huggingface.co/datasets/aimagelab/RAID and evaluation code at https://github.com/pralab/RAID.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Black-Box Forgery Attacks on Semantic Watermarks for Diffusion Models

Integrating watermarking into the generation process of latent diffusion models (LDMs) simplifies detection and attribution of generated content. Semantic watermarks, such as Tree-Rings and Gaussian Shading, represent a novel class of watermarking techniques that are easy to implement and highly robust against various perturbations. However, our work demonstrates a fundamental security vulnerability of semantic watermarks. We show that attackers can leverage unrelated models, even with different latent spaces and architectures (UNet vs DiT), to perform powerful and realistic forgery attacks. Specifically, we design two watermark forgery attacks. The first imprints a targeted watermark into real images by manipulating the latent representation of an arbitrary image in an unrelated LDM to get closer to the latent representation of a watermarked image. We also show that this technique can be used for watermark removal. The second attack generates new images with the target watermark by inverting a watermarked image and re-generating it with an arbitrary prompt. Both attacks just need a single reference image with the target watermark. Overall, our findings question the applicability of semantic watermarks by revealing that attackers can easily forge or remove these watermarks under realistic conditions.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Towards A Correct Usage of Cryptography in Semantic Watermarks for Diffusion Models

Semantic watermarking methods enable the direct integration of watermarks into the generation process of latent diffusion models by only modifying the initial latent noise. One line of approaches building on Gaussian Shading relies on cryptographic primitives to steer the sampling process of the latent noise. However, we identify several issues in the usage of cryptographic techniques in Gaussian Shading, particularly in its proof of lossless performance and key management, causing ambiguity in follow-up works, too. In this work, we therefore revisit the cryptographic primitives for semantic watermarking. We introduce a novel, general proof of lossless performance based on IND\$-CPA security for semantic watermarks. We then discuss the configuration of the cryptographic primitives in semantic watermarks with respect to security, efficiency, and generation quality.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

AnomalyDINO: Boosting Patch-based Few-shot Anomaly Detection with DINOv2

Recent advances in multimodal foundation models have set new standards in few-shot anomaly detection. This paper explores whether high-quality visual features alone are sufficient to rival existing state-of-the-art vision-language models. We affirm this by adapting DINOv2 for one-shot and few-shot anomaly detection, with a focus on industrial applications. We show that this approach does not only rival existing techniques but can even outmatch them in many settings. Our proposed vision-only approach, AnomalyDINO, follows the well-established patch-level deep nearest neighbor paradigm, and enables both image-level anomaly prediction and pixel-level anomaly segmentation. The approach is methodologically simple and training-free and, thus, does not require any additional data for fine-tuning or meta-learning. The approach is methodologically simple and training-free and, thus, does not require any additional data for fine-tuning or meta-learning. Despite its simplicity, AnomalyDINO achieves state-of-the-art results in one- and few-shot anomaly detection (e.g., pushing the one-shot performance on MVTec-AD from an AUROC of 93.1% to 96.6%). The reduced overhead, coupled with its outstanding few-shot performance, makes AnomalyDINO a strong candidate for fast deployment, e.g., in industrial contexts.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Generative Models with ELBOs Converging to Entropy Sums

The evidence lower bound (ELBO) is one of the most central objectives for probabilistic unsupervised learning. For the ELBOs of several generative models and model classes, we here prove convergence to entropy sums. As one result, we provide a list of generative models for which entropy convergence has been shown, so far, along with the corresponding expressions for entropy sums. Our considerations include very prominent generative models such as probabilistic PCA, sigmoid belief nets or Gaussian mixture models. However, we treat more models and entire model classes such as general mixtures of exponential family distributions. Our main contributions are the proofs for the individual models. For each given model we show that the conditions stated in Theorem 1 or Theorem 2 of [arXiv:2209.03077] are fulfilled such that by virtue of the theorems the given model's ELBO is equal to an entropy sum at all stationary points. The equality of the ELBO at stationary points applies under realistic conditions: for finite numbers of data points, for model/data mismatches, at any stationary point including saddle points etc, and it applies for any well behaved family of variational distributions.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2024

DistriBlock: Identifying adversarial audio samples by leveraging characteristics of the output distribution

Adversarial attacks can mislead automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems into predicting an arbitrary target text, thus posing a clear security threat. To prevent such attacks, we propose DistriBlock, an efficient detection strategy applicable to any ASR system that predicts a probability distribution over output tokens in each time step. We measure a set of characteristics of this distribution: the median, maximum, and minimum over the output probabilities, the entropy of the distribution, as well as the Kullback-Leibler and the Jensen-Shannon divergence with respect to the distributions of the subsequent time step. Then, by leveraging the characteristics observed for both benign and adversarial data, we apply binary classifiers, including simple threshold-based classification, ensembles of such classifiers, and neural networks. Through extensive analysis across different state-of-the-art ASR systems and language data sets, we demonstrate the supreme performance of this approach, with a mean area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for distinguishing target adversarial examples against clean and noisy data of 99% and 97%, respectively. To assess the robustness of our method, we show that adaptive adversarial examples that can circumvent DistriBlock are much noisier, which makes them easier to detect through filtering and creates another avenue for preserving the system's robustness.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2024

Robustifying automatic speech recognition by extracting slowly varying features

In the past few years, it has been shown that deep learning systems are highly vulnerable under attacks with adversarial examples. Neural-network-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are no exception. Targeted and untargeted attacks can modify an audio input signal in such a way that humans still recognise the same words, while ASR systems are steered to predict a different transcription. In this paper, we propose a defense mechanism against targeted adversarial attacks consisting in removing fast-changing features from the audio signals, either by applying slow feature analysis, a low-pass filter, or both, before feeding the input to the ASR system. We perform an empirical analysis of hybrid ASR models trained on data pre-processed in such a way. While the resulting models perform quite well on benign data, they are significantly more robust against targeted adversarial attacks: Our final, proposed model shows a performance on clean data similar to the baseline model, while being more than four times more robust.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2024

Integrating uncertainty quantification into randomized smoothing based robustness guarantees

Deep neural networks have proven to be extremely powerful, however, they are also vulnerable to adversarial attacks which can cause hazardous incorrect predictions in safety-critical applications. Certified robustness via randomized smoothing gives a probabilistic guarantee that the smoothed classifier's predictions will not change within an $\ell_2$-ball around a given input. On the other hand (uncertainty) score-based rejection is a technique often applied in practice to defend models against adversarial attacks. In this work, we fuse these two approaches by integrating a classifier that abstains from predicting when uncertainty is high into the certified robustness framework. This allows us to derive two novel robustness guarantees for uncertainty aware classifiers, namely (i) the radius of an $\ell_2$-ball around the input in which the same label is predicted and uncertainty remains low and (ii) the $\ell_2$-radius of a ball in which the predictions will either not change or be uncertain. While the former provides robustness guarantees with respect to attacks aiming at increased uncertainty, the latter informs about the amount of input perturbation necessary to lead the uncertainty aware model into a wrong prediction. Notably, this is on CIFAR10 up to 20.93% larger than for models not allowing for uncertainty based rejection. We demonstrate, that the novel framework allows for a systematic robustness evaluation of different network architectures and uncertainty measures and to identify desired properties of uncertainty quantification techniques. Moreover, we show that leveraging uncertainty in a smoothed classifier helps out-of-distribution detection.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

AI-Generated Faces in the Real World: A Large-Scale Case Study of Twitter Profile Images

Recent advances in the field of generative artificial intelligence (AI) have blurred the lines between authentic and machine-generated content, making it almost impossible for humans to distinguish between such media. One notable consequence is the use of AI-generated images for fake profiles on social media. While several types of disinformation campaigns and similar incidents have been reported in the past, a systematic analysis has been lacking. In this work, we conduct the first large-scale investigation of the prevalence of AI-generated profile pictures on Twitter. We tackle the challenges of a real-world measurement study by carefully integrating various data sources and designing a multi-stage detection pipeline. Our analysis of nearly 15 million Twitter profile pictures shows that 0.052% were artificially generated, confirming their notable presence on the platform. We comprehensively examine the characteristics of these accounts and their tweet content, and uncover patterns of coordinated inauthentic behavior. The results also reveal several motives, including spamming and political amplification campaigns. Our research reaffirms the need for effective detection and mitigation strategies to cope with the potential negative effects of generative AI in the future.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Detecting Adversarial Attacks in Semantic Segmentation via Uncertainty Estimation: A Deep Analysis

Deep neural networks have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness across a wide range of tasks such as semantic segmentation. Nevertheless, these networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that add imperceptible perturbations to the input image, leading to false predictions. This vulnerability is particularly dangerous in safety-critical applications like automated driving. While adversarial examples and defense strategies are well-researched in the context of image classification, there is comparatively less research focused on semantic segmentation. Recently, we have proposed an uncertainty-based method for detecting adversarial attacks on neural networks for semantic segmentation. We observed that uncertainty, as measured by the entropy of the output distribution, behaves differently on clean versus adversely perturbed images, and we utilize this property to differentiate between the two. In this extended version of our work, we conduct a detailed analysis of uncertainty-based detection of adversarial attacks including a diverse set of adversarial attacks and various state-of-the-art neural networks. Our numerical experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed uncertainty-based detection method, which is lightweight and operates as a post-processing step, i.e., no model modifications or knowledge of the adversarial example generation process are required.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Single-Model Attribution of Generative Models Through Final-Layer Inversion

Recent breakthroughs in generative modeling have sparked interest in practical single-model attribution. Such methods predict whether a sample was generated by a specific generator or not, for instance, to prove intellectual property theft. However, previous works are either limited to the closed-world setting or require undesirable changes to the generative model. We address these shortcomings by, first, viewing single-model attribution through the lens of anomaly detection. Arising from this change of perspective, we propose FLIPAD, a new approach for single-model attribution in the open-world setting based on final-layer inversion and anomaly detection. We show that the utilized final-layer inversion can be reduced to a convex lasso optimization problem, making our approach theoretically sound and computationally efficient. The theoretical findings are accompanied by an experimental study demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach and its flexibility to various domains.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Landscaping Linear Mode Connectivity

The presence of linear paths in parameter space between two different network solutions in certain cases, i.e., linear mode connectivity (LMC), has garnered interest from both theoretical and practical fronts. There has been significant research that either practically designs algorithms catered for connecting networks by adjusting for the permutation symmetries as well as some others that more theoretically construct paths through which networks can be connected. Yet, the core reasons for the occurrence of LMC, when in fact it does occur, in the highly non-convex loss landscapes of neural networks are far from clear. In this work, we take a step towards understanding it by providing a model of how the loss landscape needs to behave topographically for LMC (or the lack thereof) to manifest. Concretely, we present a `mountainside and ridge' perspective that helps to neatly tie together different geometric features that can be spotted in the loss landscape along the training runs. We also complement this perspective by providing a theoretical analysis of the barrier height, for which we provide empirical support, and which additionally extends as a faithful predictor of layer-wise LMC. We close with a toy example that provides further intuition on how barriers arise in the first place, all in all, showcasing the larger aim of the work -- to provide a working model of the landscape and its topography for the occurrence of LMC.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Benchmarking the Fairness of Image Upsampling Methods

Recent years have witnessed a rapid development of deep generative models for creating synthetic media, such as images and videos. While the practical applications of these models in everyday tasks are enticing, it is crucial to assess the inherent risks regarding their fairness. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive framework for benchmarking the performance and fairness of conditional generative models. We develop a set of metrics$\unicode{x2013}$inspired by their supervised fairness counterparts$\unicode{x2013}$to evaluate the models on their fairness and diversity. Focusing on the specific application of image upsampling, we create a benchmark covering a wide variety of modern upsampling methods. As part of the benchmark, we introduce UnfairFace, a subset of FairFace that replicates the racial distribution of common large-scale face datasets. Our empirical study highlights the importance of using an unbiased training set and reveals variations in how the algorithms respond to dataset imbalances. Alarmingly, we find that none of the considered methods produces statistically fair and diverse results. All experiments can be reproduced using our provided repository.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Learning Sparse Codes with Entropy-Based ELBOs

Standard probabilistic sparse coding assumes a Laplace prior, a linear mapping from latents to observables, and Gaussian observable distributions. We here derive a solely entropy-based learning objective for the parameters of standard sparse coding. The novel variational objective has the following features: (A) unlike MAP approximations, it uses non-trivial posterior approximations for probabilistic inference; (B) unlike for previous non-trivial approximations, the novel objective is fully analytical; and (C) the objective allows for a novel principled form of annealing. The objective is derived by first showing that the standard ELBO objective converges to a sum of entropies, which matches similar recent results for generative models with Gaussian priors. The conditions under which the ELBO becomes equal to entropies are then shown to have analytical solutions, which leads to the fully analytical objective. Numerical experiments are used to demonstrate the feasibility of learning with such entropy-based ELBOs. We investigate different posterior approximations including Gaussians with correlated latents and deep amortized approximations. Furthermore, we numerically investigate entropy-based annealing which results in improved learning. Our main contributions are theoretical, however, and they are twofold: (1) for non-trivial posterior approximations, we provide the (to the knowledge of the authors) first analytical ELBO objective for standard probabilistic sparse coding; and (2) we provide the first demonstration on how a recently shown convergence of the ELBO to entropy sums can be used for learning.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2024

AEROBLADE: Training-Free Detection of Latent Diffusion Images Using Autoencoder Reconstruction Error

With recent text-to-image models, anyone can generate deceptively realistic images with arbitrary contents, fueling the growing threat of visual disinformation. A key enabler for generating high-resolution images with low computational cost has been the development of latent diffusion models (LDMs). In contrast to conventional diffusion models, LDMs perform the denoising process in the low-dimensional latent space of a pre-trained autoencoder (AE) instead of the high-dimensional image space. Despite their relevance, the forensic analysis of LDMs is still in its infancy. In this work we propose AEROBLADE, a novel detection method which exploits an inherent component of LDMs: the AE used to transform images between image and latent space. We find that generated images can be more accurately reconstructed by the AE than real images, allowing for a simple detection approach based on the reconstruction error. Most importantly, our method is easy to implement and does not require any training, yet nearly matches the performance of detectors that rely on extensive training. We empirically demonstrate that AEROBLADE is effective against state-of-the-art LDMs, including Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. Beyond detection, our approach allows for the qualitative analysis of images, which can be leveraged for identifying inpainted regions. We release our code and data at https://github.com/jonasricker/aeroblade .

cs.CV↗