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Di He

Publications and source records attributed to Di He.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

Rethinking Lipschitz Neural Networks and Certified Robustness: A Boolean Function Perspective

Designing neural networks with bounded Lipschitz constant is a promising way to obtain certifiably robust classifiers against adversarial examples. However, the relevant progress for the important $\ell_\infty$ perturbation setting is rather limited, and a principled understanding of how to design expressive $\ell_\infty$ Lipschitz networks is still lacking. In this paper, we bridge the gap by studying certified $\ell_\infty$ robustness from a novel perspective of representing Boolean functions. We derive two fundamental impossibility results that hold for any standard Lipschitz network: one for robust classification on finite datasets, and the other for Lipschitz function approximation. These results identify that networks built upon norm-bounded affine layers and Lipschitz activations intrinsically lose expressive power even in the two-dimensional case, and shed light on how recently proposed Lipschitz networks (e.g., GroupSort and $\ell_\infty$-distance nets) bypass these impossibilities by leveraging order statistic functions. Finally, based on these insights, we develop a unified Lipschitz network that generalizes prior works, and design a practical version that can be efficiently trained (making certified robust training free). Extensive experiments show that our approach is scalable, efficient, and consistently yields better certified robustness across multiple datasets and perturbation radii than prior Lipschitz networks. Our code is available at https://github.com/zbh2047/SortNet.

cs.LG↗

HousE: Knowledge Graph Embedding with Householder Parameterization

The effectiveness of knowledge graph embedding (KGE) largely depends on the ability to model intrinsic relation patterns and mapping properties. However, existing approaches can only capture some of them with insufficient modeling capacity. In this work, we propose a more powerful KGE framework named HousE, which involves a novel parameterization based on two kinds of Householder transformations: (1) Householder rotations to achieve superior capacity of modeling relation patterns; (2) Householder projections to handle sophisticated relation mapping properties. Theoretically, HousE is capable of modeling crucial relation patterns and mapping properties simultaneously. Besides, HousE is a generalization of existing rotation-based models while extending the rotations to high-dimensional spaces. Empirically, HousE achieves new state-of-the-art performance on five benchmark datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/anrep/HousE.

cs.AI↗

Adversarial Noises Are Linearly Separable for (Nearly) Random Neural Networks

Adversarial examples, which are usually generated for specific inputs with a specific model, are ubiquitous for neural networks. In this paper we unveil a surprising property of adversarial noises when they are put together, i.e., adversarial noises crafted by one-step gradient methods are linearly separable if equipped with the corresponding labels. We theoretically prove this property for a two-layer network with randomly initialized entries and the neural tangent kernel setup where the parameters are not far from initialization. The proof idea is to show the label information can be efficiently backpropagated to the input while keeping the linear separability. Our theory and experimental evidence further show that the linear classifier trained with the adversarial noises of the training data can well classify the adversarial noises of the test data, indicating that adversarial noises actually inject a distributional perturbation to the original data distribution. Furthermore, we empirically demonstrate that the adversarial noises may become less linearly separable when the above conditions are compromised while they are still much easier to classify than original features.

cs.LG↗

METRO: Efficient Denoising Pretraining of Large Scale Autoencoding Language Models with Model Generated Signals

We present an efficient method of pretraining large-scale autoencoding language models using training signals generated by an auxiliary model. Originated in ELECTRA, this training strategy has demonstrated sample-efficiency to pretrain models at the scale of hundreds of millions of parameters. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study, and propose a recipe, namely "Model generated dEnoising TRaining Objective" (METRO), which incorporates some of the best modeling techniques developed recently to speed up, stabilize, and enhance pretrained language models without compromising model effectiveness. The resultant models, METRO-LM, consisting of up to 5.4 billion parameters, achieve new state-of-the-art on the GLUE, SuperGLUE, and SQuAD benchmarks. More importantly, METRO-LM are efficient in that they often outperform previous large models with significantly smaller model sizes and lower pretraining cost.

cs.LG↗

Two Coupled Rejection Metrics Can Tell Adversarial Examples Apart

Correctly classifying adversarial examples is an essential but challenging requirement for safely deploying machine learning models. As reported in RobustBench, even the state-of-the-art adversarially trained models struggle to exceed 67% robust test accuracy on CIFAR-10, which is far from practical. A complementary way towards robustness is to introduce a rejection option, allowing the model to not return predictions on uncertain inputs, where confidence is a commonly used certainty proxy. Along with this routine, we find that confidence and a rectified confidence (R-Con) can form two coupled rejection metrics, which could provably distinguish wrongly classified inputs from correctly classified ones. This intriguing property sheds light on using coupling strategies to better detect and reject adversarial examples. We evaluate our rectified rejection (RR) module on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-10-C, and CIFAR-100 under several attacks including adaptive ones, and demonstrate that the RR module is compatible with different adversarial training frameworks on improving robustness, with little extra computation. The code is available at https://github.com/P2333/Rectified-Rejection.

cs.LG↗

Boosting the Certified Robustness of L-infinity Distance Nets

Recently, Zhang et al. (2021) developed a new neural network architecture based on $\ell_\infty$-distance functions, which naturally possesses certified $\ell_\infty$ robustness by its construction. Despite the novel design and theoretical foundation, so far the model only achieved comparable performance to conventional networks. In this paper, we make the following two contributions: $\mathrm{(i)}$ We demonstrate that $\ell_\infty$-distance nets enjoy a fundamental advantage in certified robustness over conventional networks (under typical certification approaches); $\mathrm{(ii)}$ With an improved training process we are able to significantly boost the certified accuracy of $\ell_\infty$-distance nets. Our training approach largely alleviates the optimization problem that arose in the previous training scheme, in particular, the unexpected large Lipschitz constant due to the use of a crucial trick called $\ell_p$-relaxation. The core of our training approach is a novel objective function that combines scaled cross-entropy loss and clipped hinge loss with a decaying mixing coefficient. Experiments show that using the proposed training strategy, the certified accuracy of $\ell_\infty$-distance net can be dramatically improved from 33.30% to 40.06% on CIFAR-10 ($ε=8/255$), meanwhile outperforming other approaches in this area by a large margin. Our results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness and potential of $\ell_\infty$-distance net for certified robustness. Codes are available at https://github.com/zbh2047/L_inf-dist-net-v2.

cs.LG↗

MACER: Attack-free and Scalable Robust Training via Maximizing Certified Radius

Adversarial training is one of the most popular ways to learn robust models but is usually attack-dependent and time costly. In this paper, we propose the MACER algorithm, which learns robust models without using adversarial training but performs better than all existing provable l2-defenses. Recent work shows that randomized smoothing can be used to provide a certified l2 radius to smoothed classifiers, and our algorithm trains provably robust smoothed classifiers via MAximizing the CErtified Radius (MACER). The attack-free characteristic makes MACER faster to train and easier to optimize. In our experiments, we show that our method can be applied to modern deep neural networks on a wide range of datasets, including Cifar-10, ImageNet, MNIST, and SVHN. For all tasks, MACER spends less training time than state-of-the-art adversarial training algorithms, and the learned models achieve larger average certified radius.

cs.LG↗

An Empirical Study of Graphormer on Large-Scale Molecular Modeling Datasets

This technical note describes the recent updates of Graphormer, including architecture design modifications, and the adaption to 3D molecular dynamics simulation. The "Graphormer-V2" could attain better results on large-scale molecular modeling datasets than the vanilla one, and the performance gain could be consistently obtained on downstream tasks. In addition, we show that with a global receptive field and an adaptive aggregation strategy, Graphormer is more powerful than classic message-passing-based GNNs. Graphormer-V2 achieves much less MAE than the vanilla Graphormer on the PCQM4M quantum chemistry dataset used in KDD Cup 2021, where the latter one won the first place in this competition. In the meanwhile, Graphormer-V2 greatly outperforms the competitors in the recent Open Catalyst Challenge, which is a competition track on NeurIPS 2021 workshop, and aims to model the catalyst-adsorbate reaction system with advanced AI models. All models could be found at \url{https://github.com/Microsoft/Graphormer}.

physics.chem-ph↗

VADOI:Voice-Activity-Detection Overlapping Inference For End-to-end Long-form Speech Recognition

While end-to-end models have shown great success on the Automatic Speech Recognition task, performance degrades severely when target sentences are long-form. The previous proposed methods, (partial) overlapping inference are shown to be effective on long-form decoding. For both methods, word error rate (WER) decreases monotonically when overlapping percentage decreases. Setting aside computational cost, the setup with 50% overlapping during inference can achieve the best performance. However, a lower overlapping percentage has an advantage of fast inference speed. In this paper, we first conduct comprehensive experiments comparing overlapping inference and partial overlapping inference with various configurations. We then propose Voice-Activity-Detection Overlapping Inference to provide a trade-off between WER and computation cost. Results show that the proposed method can achieve a 20% relative computation cost reduction on Librispeech and Microsoft Speech Language Translation long-form corpus while maintaining the WER performance when comparing to the best performing overlapping inference algorithm. We also propose Soft-Match to compensate for similar words mis-aligned problem.

eess.AS↗

Do Transformers Really Perform Bad for Graph Representation?

The Transformer architecture has become a dominant choice in many domains, such as natural language processing and computer vision. Yet, it has not achieved competitive performance on popular leaderboards of graph-level prediction compared to mainstream GNN variants. Therefore, it remains a mystery how Transformers could perform well for graph representation learning. In this paper, we solve this mystery by presenting Graphormer, which is built upon the standard Transformer architecture, and could attain excellent results on a broad range of graph representation learning tasks, especially on the recent OGB Large-Scale Challenge. Our key insight to utilizing Transformer in the graph is the necessity of effectively encoding the structural information of a graph into the model. To this end, we propose several simple yet effective structural encoding methods to help Graphormer better model graph-structured data. Besides, we mathematically characterize the expressive power of Graphormer and exhibit that with our ways of encoding the structural information of graphs, many popular GNN variants could be covered as the special cases of Graphormer.

cs.LG↗

Exploration of Dark Chemical Genomics Space via Portal Learning: Applied to Targeting the Undruggable Genome and COVID-19 Anti-Infective Polypharmacology

Advances in biomedicine are largely fueled by exploring uncharted territories of human biology. Machine learning can both enable and accelerate discovery, but faces a fundamental hurdle when applied to unseen data with distributions that differ from previously observed ones -- a common dilemma in scientific inquiry. We have developed a new deep learning framework, called {\textit{Portal Learning}}, to explore dark chemical and biological space. Three key, novel components of our approach include: (i) end-to-end, step-wise transfer learning, in recognition of biology's sequence-structure-function paradigm, (ii) out-of-cluster meta-learning, and (iii) stress model selection. Portal Learning provides a practical solution to the out-of-distribution (OOD) problem in statistical machine learning. Here, we have implemented Portal Learning to predict chemical-protein interactions on a genome-wide scale. Systematic studies demonstrate that Portal Learning can effectively assign ligands to unexplored gene families (unknown functions), versus existing state-of-the-art methods, thereby allowing us to target previously "undruggable" proteins and design novel polypharmacological agents for disrupting interactions between SARS-CoV-2 and human proteins. Portal Learning is general-purpose and can be further applied to other areas of scientific inquiry.

q-bio.QM↗

Stable, Fast and Accurate: Kernelized Attention with Relative Positional Encoding

The attention module, which is a crucial component in Transformer, cannot scale efficiently to long sequences due to its quadratic complexity. Many works focus on approximating the dot-then-exponentiate softmax function in the original attention, leading to sub-quadratic or even linear-complexity Transformer architectures. However, we show that these methods cannot be applied to more powerful attention modules that go beyond the dot-then-exponentiate style, e.g., Transformers with relative positional encoding (RPE). Since in many state-of-the-art models, relative positional encoding is used as default, designing efficient Transformers that can incorporate RPE is appealing. In this paper, we propose a novel way to accelerate attention calculation for Transformers with RPE on top of the kernelized attention. Based upon the observation that relative positional encoding forms a Toeplitz matrix, we mathematically show that kernelized attention with RPE can be calculated efficiently using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). With FFT, our method achieves $\mathcal{O}(n\log n)$ time complexity. Interestingly, we further demonstrate that properly using relative positional encoding can mitigate the training instability problem of vanilla kernelized attention. On a wide range of tasks, we empirically show that our models can be trained from scratch without any optimization issues. The learned model performs better than many efficient Transformer variants and is faster than standard Transformer in the long-sequence regime.

cs.LG↗

Can Vision Transformers Perform Convolution?

Several recent studies have demonstrated that attention-based networks, such as Vision Transformer (ViT), can outperform Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on several computer vision tasks without using convolutional layers. This naturally leads to the following questions: Can a self-attention layer of ViT express any convolution operation? In this work, we prove that a single ViT layer with image patches as the input can perform any convolution operation constructively, where the multi-head attention mechanism and the relative positional encoding play essential roles. We further provide a lower bound on the number of heads for Vision Transformers to express CNNs. Corresponding with our analysis, experimental results show that the construction in our proof can help inject convolutional bias into Transformers and significantly improve the performance of ViT in low data regimes.

cs.CV↗

Less is More: Pre-train a Strong Text Encoder for Dense Retrieval Using a Weak Decoder

Dense retrieval requires high-quality text sequence embeddings to support effective search in the representation space. Autoencoder-based language models are appealing in dense retrieval as they train the encoder to output high-quality embedding that can reconstruct the input texts. However, in this paper, we provide theoretical analyses and show empirically that an autoencoder language model with a low reconstruction loss may not provide good sequence representations because the decoder may take shortcuts by exploiting language patterns. To address this, we propose a new self-learning method that pre-trains the autoencoder using a \textit{weak} decoder, with restricted capacity and attention flexibility to push the encoder to provide better text representations. Our experiments on web search, news recommendation, and open domain question answering show that our pre-trained model significantly boosts the effectiveness and few-shot ability of dense retrieval models. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/SEED-Encoder/.

cs.LG↗

Wav2vec-C: A Self-supervised Model for Speech Representation Learning

Wav2vec-C introduces a novel representation learning technique combining elements from wav2vec 2.0 and VQ-VAE. Our model learns to reproduce quantized representations from partially masked speech encoding using a contrastive loss in a way similar to Wav2vec 2.0. However, the quantization process is regularized by an additional consistency network that learns to reconstruct the input features to the wav2vec 2.0 network from the quantized representations in a way similar to a VQ-VAE model. The proposed self-supervised model is trained on 10k hours of unlabeled data and subsequently used as the speech encoder in a RNN-T ASR model and fine-tuned with 1k hours of labeled data. This work is one of only a few studies of self-supervised learning on speech tasks with a large volume of real far-field labeled data. The Wav2vec-C encoded representations achieves, on average, twice the error reduction over baseline and a higher codebook utilization in comparison to wav2vec 2.0

eess.AS↗

First Place Solution of KDD Cup 2021 & OGB Large-Scale Challenge Graph Prediction Track

In this technical report, we present our solution of KDD Cup 2021 OGB Large-Scale Challenge - PCQM4M-LSC Track. We adopt Graphormer and ExpC as our basic models. We train each model by 8-fold cross-validation, and additionally train two Graphormer models on the union of training and validation sets with different random seeds. For final submission, we use a naive ensemble for these 18 models by taking average of their outputs. Using our method, our team MachineLearning achieved 0.1200 MAE on test set, which won the first place in KDD Cup graph prediction track.

cs.LG↗

Towards Certifying L-infinity Robustness using Neural Networks with L-inf-dist Neurons

It is well-known that standard neural networks, even with a high classification accuracy, are vulnerable to small $\ell_\infty$-norm bounded adversarial perturbations. Although many attempts have been made, most previous works either can only provide empirical verification of the defense to a particular attack method, or can only develop a certified guarantee of the model robustness in limited scenarios. In this paper, we seek for a new approach to develop a theoretically principled neural network that inherently resists $\ell_\infty$ perturbations. In particular, we design a novel neuron that uses $\ell_\infty$-distance as its basic operation (which we call $\ell_\infty$-dist neuron), and show that any neural network constructed with $\ell_\infty$-dist neurons (called $\ell_{\infty}$-dist net) is naturally a 1-Lipschitz function with respect to $\ell_\infty$-norm. This directly provides a rigorous guarantee of the certified robustness based on the margin of prediction outputs. We then prove that such networks have enough expressive power to approximate any 1-Lipschitz function with robust generalization guarantee. We further provide a holistic training strategy that can greatly alleviate optimization difficulties. Experimental results show that using $\ell_{\infty}$-dist nets as basic building blocks, we consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance on commonly used datasets: 93.09% certified accuracy on MNIST ($ε=0.3$), 35.42% on CIFAR-10 ($ε=8/255$) and 16.31% on TinyImageNet ($ε=1/255$).

cs.LG↗

GraphNorm: A Principled Approach to Accelerating Graph Neural Network Training

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.

cs.LG↗