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Haohan Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Haohan Wang.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

Towards Understanding Adversarial Transferability in Federated Learning

We investigate a specific security risk in FL: a group of malicious clients has impacted the model during training by disguising their identities and acting as benign clients but later switching to an adversarial role. They use their data, which was part of the training set, to train a substitute model and conduct transferable adversarial attacks against the federated model. This type of attack is subtle and hard to detect because these clients initially appear to be benign. The key question we address is: How robust is the FL system to such covert attacks, especially compared to traditional centralized learning systems? We empirically show that the proposed attack imposes a high security risk to current FL systems. By using only 3\% of the client's data, we achieve the highest attack rate of over 80\%. To further offer a full understanding of the challenges the FL system faces in transferable attacks, we provide a comprehensive analysis over the transfer robustness of FL across a spectrum of configurations. Surprisingly, FL systems show a higher level of robustness than their centralized counterparts, especially when both systems are equally good at handling regular, non-malicious data. We attribute this increased robustness to two main factors: 1) Decentralized Data Training: Each client trains the model on its own data, reducing the overall impact of any single malicious client. 2) Model Update Averaging: The updates from each client are averaged together, further diluting any malicious alterations. Both practical experiments and theoretical analysis support our conclusions. This research not only sheds light on the resilience of FL systems against hidden attacks but also raises important considerations for their future application and development.

cs.LG↗

Robust Prompt Optimization for Defending Language Models Against Jailbreaking Attacks

Despite advances in AI alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks or jailbreaking, in which adversaries can modify prompts to induce unwanted behavior. While some defenses have been proposed, they have not been adapted to newly proposed attacks and more challenging threat models. To address this, we propose an optimization-based objective for defending LLMs against jailbreaking attacks and an algorithm, Robust Prompt Optimization (RPO) to create robust system-level defenses. Our approach directly incorporates the adversary into the defensive objective and optimizes a lightweight and transferable suffix, enabling RPO to adapt to worst-case adaptive attacks. Our theoretical and experimental results show improved robustness to both jailbreaks seen during optimization and unknown jailbreaks, reducing the attack success rate (ASR) on GPT-4 to 6% and Llama-2 to 0% on JailbreakBench, setting the state-of-the-art. Code can be found at https://github.com/lapisrocks/rpo

cs.LG↗

MemeCLIP: Leveraging CLIP Representations for Multimodal Meme Classification

The complexity of text-embedded images presents a formidable challenge in machine learning given the need for multimodal understanding of multiple aspects of expression conveyed by them. While previous research in multimodal analysis has primarily focused on singular aspects such as hate speech and its subclasses, this study expands this focus to encompass multiple aspects of linguistics: hate, targets of hate, stance, and humor. We introduce a novel dataset PrideMM comprising 5,063 text-embedded images associated with the LGBTQ+ Pride movement, thereby addressing a serious gap in existing resources. We conduct extensive experimentation on PrideMM by using unimodal and multimodal baseline methods to establish benchmarks for each task. Additionally, we propose a novel framework MemeCLIP for efficient downstream learning while preserving the knowledge of the pre-trained CLIP model. The results of our experiments show that MemeCLIP achieves superior performance compared to previously proposed frameworks on two real-world datasets. We further compare the performance of MemeCLIP and zero-shot GPT-4 on the hate classification task. Finally, we discuss the shortcomings of our model by qualitatively analyzing misclassified samples. Our code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/SiddhantBikram/MemeCLIP.

cs.LG↗

Effect of Substrate on Spin-Wave Propagation Properties in Ferrimagnetic Thulium Iron Garnet Thin Films

Rare-earth iron garnets have distinctive spin-wave (SW) properties such as low magnetic damping and long SW coherence length making them ideal candidates for magnonics. Among them, thulium iron garnet (TmIG) is a ferrimagnetic insulator with unique magnetic properties including perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) and topological hall effect at room temperature when grown down to a few nanometers, extending its application to magnon spintronics. Here, the SW propagation properties of TmIG films (thickness of 7-34 nm) grown on GGG and sGGG substrates are studied at room temperature. Magnetic measurements show in-plane magnetic anisotropy for TmIG films grown on GGG and out-of-plane magnetic anisotropy for films grown on sGGG substrates with PMA. SW electrical transmission spectroscopy measurements on TmIG/GGG films unveil magnetostatic surface spin waves (MSSWs) propagating up to 80 um with a SW group velocity of 2-8 km s^-1. Intriguingly, these MSSWs exhibit nonreciprocal propagation, opening new applications in SW functional devices. TmIG films grown on sGGG substrates exhibit forward volume spin waves with a reciprocal propagation behavior up to 32 um.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Deconstructing The Ethics of Large Language Models from Long-standing Issues to New-emerging Dilemmas: A Survey

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved unparalleled success across diverse language modeling tasks in recent years. However, this progress has also intensified ethical concerns, impacting the deployment of LLMs in everyday contexts. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of ethical challenges associated with LLMs, from longstanding issues such as copyright infringement, systematic bias, and data privacy, to emerging problems like truthfulness and social norms. We critically analyze existing research aimed at understanding, examining, and mitigating these ethical risks. Our survey underscores integrating ethical standards and societal values into the development of LLMs, thereby guiding the development of responsible and ethically aligned language models.

cs.CL↗

Conflict-Aware Adversarial Training

Adversarial training is the most effective method to obtain adversarial robustness for deep neural networks by directly involving adversarial samples in the training procedure. To obtain an accurate and robust model, the weighted-average method is applied to optimize standard loss and adversarial loss simultaneously. In this paper, we argue that the weighted-average method does not provide the best tradeoff for the standard performance and adversarial robustness. We argue that the failure of the weighted-average method is due to the conflict between the gradients derived from standard and adversarial loss, and further demonstrate such a conflict increases with attack budget theoretically and practically. To alleviate this problem, we propose a new trade-off paradigm for adversarial training with a conflict-aware factor for the convex combination of standard and adversarial loss, named \textbf{Conflict-Aware Adversarial Training~(CA-AT)}. Comprehensive experimental results show that CA-AT consistently offers a superior trade-off between standard performance and adversarial robustness under the settings of adversarial training from scratch and parameter-efficient finetuning.

cs.LG↗

DistDD: Distributed Data Distillation Aggregation through Gradient Matching

In this paper, we introduce DistDD, a novel approach within the federated learning framework that reduces the need for repetitive communication by distilling data directly on clients' devices. Unlike traditional federated learning that requires iterative model updates across nodes, DistDD facilitates a one-time distillation process that extracts a global distilled dataset, maintaining the privacy standards of federated learning while significantly cutting down communication costs. By leveraging the DistDD's distilled dataset, the developers of the FL can achieve just-in-time parameter tuning and neural architecture search over FL without repeating the whole FL process multiple times. We provide a detailed convergence proof of the DistDD algorithm, reinforcing its mathematical stability and reliability for practical applications. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of DistDD, particularly in non-i.i.d. and mislabeled data scenarios, showcasing its potential to handle complex real-world data challenges distinctively from conventional federated learning methods. We also evaluate DistDD's application in the use case and prove its effectiveness and communication-savings in the NAS use case.

cs.LG↗

Simple Unsupervised Knowledge Distillation With Space Similarity

As per recent studies, Self-supervised learning (SSL) does not readily extend to smaller architectures. One direction to mitigate this shortcoming while simultaneously training a smaller network without labels is to adopt unsupervised knowledge distillation (UKD). Existing UKD approaches handcraft preservation worthy inter/intra sample relationships between the teacher and its student. However, this may overlook/ignore other key relationships present in the mapping of a teacher. In this paper, instead of heuristically constructing preservation worthy relationships between samples, we directly motivate the student to model the teacher's embedding manifold. If the mapped manifold is similar, all inter/intra sample relationships are indirectly conserved. We first demonstrate that prior methods cannot preserve teacher's latent manifold due to their sole reliance on $L_2$ normalised embedding features. Subsequently, we propose a simple objective to capture the lost information due to normalisation. Our proposed loss component, termed \textbf{space similarity}, motivates each dimension of a student's feature space to be similar to the corresponding dimension of its teacher. We perform extensive experiments demonstrating strong performance of our proposed approach on various benchmarks.

cs.AI↗

DS-ViT: Dual-Stream Vision Transformer for Cross-Task Distillation in Alzheimer's Early Diagnosis

In the field of Alzheimer's disease diagnosis, segmentation and classification tasks are inherently interconnected. Sharing knowledge between models for these tasks can significantly improve training efficiency, particularly when training data is scarce. However, traditional knowledge distillation techniques often struggle to bridge the gap between segmentation and classification due to the distinct nature of tasks and different model architectures. To address this challenge, we propose a dual-stream pipeline that facilitates cross-task and cross-architecture knowledge sharing. Our approach introduces a dual-stream embedding module that unifies feature representations from segmentation and classification models, enabling dimensional integration of these features to guide the classification model. We validated our method on multiple 3D datasets for Alzheimer's disease diagnosis, demonstrating significant improvements in classification performance, especially on small datasets. Furthermore, we extended our pipeline with a residual temporal attention mechanism for early diagnosis, utilizing images taken before the atrophy of patients' brain mass. This advancement shows promise in enabling diagnosis approximately six months earlier in mild and asymptomatic stages, offering critical time for intervention.

eess.IV↗

A Quantitative Approach for Evaluating Disease Focus and Interpretability of Deep Learning Models for Alzheimer's Disease Classification

Deep learning (DL) models have shown significant potential in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) classification. However, understanding and interpreting these models remains challenging, which hinders the adoption of these models in clinical practice. Techniques such as saliency maps have been proven effective in providing visual and empirical clues about how these models work, but there still remains a gap in understanding which specific brain regions DL models focus on and whether these brain regions are pathologically associated with AD. To bridge such gap, in this study, we developed a quantitative disease-focusing strategy to first enhance the interpretability of DL models using saliency maps and brain segmentations; then we propose a disease-focus (DF) score that quantifies how much a DL model focuses on brain areas relevant to AD pathology based on clinically known MRI-based pathological regions of AD. Using this strategy, we compared several state-of-the-art DL models, including a baseline 3D ResNet model, a pretrained MedicalNet model, and a MedicalNet with data augmentation to classify patients with AD vs. cognitive normal patients using MRI data; then we evaluated these models in terms of their abilities to focus on disease-relevant regions. Our results show interesting disease-focusing patterns with different models, particularly characteristic patterns with the pretrained models and data augmentation, and also provide insight into their classification performance. These results suggest that the approach we developed for quantitatively assessing the abilities of DL models to focus on disease-relevant regions may help improve interpretability of these models for AD classification and facilitate their adoption for AD diagnosis in clinical practice. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Liang-lt/ADNI.

cs.CV↗

Towards Reliable Advertising Image Generation Using Human Feedback

In the e-commerce realm, compelling advertising images are pivotal for attracting customer attention. While generative models automate image generation, they often produce substandard images that may mislead customers and require significant labor costs to inspect. This paper delves into increasing the rate of available generated images. We first introduce a multi-modal Reliable Feedback Network (RFNet) to automatically inspect the generated images. Combining the RFNet into a recurrent process, Recurrent Generation, results in a higher number of available advertising images. To further enhance production efficiency, we fine-tune diffusion models with an innovative Consistent Condition regularization utilizing the feedback from RFNet (RFFT). This results in a remarkable increase in the available rate of generated images, reducing the number of attempts in Recurrent Generation, and providing a highly efficient production process without sacrificing visual appeal. We also construct a Reliable Feedback 1 Million (RF1M) dataset which comprises over one million generated advertising images annotated by human, which helps to train RFNet to accurately assess the availability of generated images and faithfully reflect the human feedback. Generally speaking, our approach offers a reliable solution for advertising image generation.

cs.CV↗

CatchBackdoor: Backdoor Detection via Critical Trojan Neural Path Fuzzing

The success of deep neural networks (DNNs) in real-world applications has benefited from abundant pre-trained models. However, the backdoored pre-trained models can pose a significant trojan threat to the deployment of downstream DNNs. Numerous backdoor detection methods have been proposed but are limited to two aspects: (1) high sensitivity on trigger size, especially on stealthy attacks (i.e., blending attacks and defense adaptive attacks); (2) rely heavily on benign examples for reverse engineering. To address these challenges, we empirically observed that trojaned behaviors triggered by various trojan attacks can be attributed to the trojan path, composed of top-$k$ critical neurons with more significant contributions to model prediction changes. Motivated by it, we propose CatchBackdoor, a detection method against trojan attacks. Based on the close connection between trojaned behaviors and trojan path to trigger errors, CatchBackdoor starts from the benign path and gradually approximates the trojan path through differential fuzzing. We then reverse triggers from the trojan path, to trigger errors caused by diverse trojaned attacks. Extensive experiments on MINST, CIFAR-10, and a-ImageNet datasets and 7 models (LeNet, ResNet, and VGG) demonstrate the superiority of CatchBackdoor over the state-of-the-art methods, in terms of (1) \emph{effective} - it shows better detection performance, especially on stealthy attacks ($\sim$ $\times$ 2 on average); (2) \emph{extensible} - it is robust to trigger size and can conduct detection without benign examples.

cs.CR↗

EditShield: Protecting Unauthorized Image Editing by Instruction-guided Diffusion Models

Text-to-image diffusion models have emerged as an evolutionary for producing creative content in image synthesis. Based on the impressive generation abilities of these models, instruction-guided diffusion models can edit images with simple instructions and input images. While they empower users to obtain their desired edited images with ease, they have raised concerns about unauthorized image manipulation. Prior research has delved into the unauthorized use of personalized diffusion models; however, this problem of instruction-guided diffusion models remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we first propose a protection method EditShield against unauthorized modifications from such models. Specifically, EditShield works by adding imperceptible perturbations that can shift the latent representation used in the diffusion process, tricking models into generating unrealistic images with mismatched subjects. Our extensive experiments demonstrate EditShield's effectiveness among synthetic and real-world datasets. Besides, we found that EditShield performs robustly against various manipulation settings across editing types and synonymous instruction phrases.

cs.CR↗

Leveraging Large Language Models for Scalable Vector Graphics-Driven Image Understanding

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in natural language understanding. However, through that enormous semantic representation that the LLM has learnt, is it somehow possible for it to understand images as well? This work investigates this question. To enable the LLM to process images, we convert them into a representation given by Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). To study what the LLM can do with this XML-based textual description of images, we test the LLM on three broad computer vision tasks: (i) visual reasoning and question answering, (ii) image classification under distribution shift, few-shot learning, and (iii) generating new images using visual prompting. Even though we do not naturally associate LLMs with any visual understanding capabilities, our results indicate that the LLM can often do a decent job in many of these tasks, potentially opening new avenues for research into LLMs' ability to understand image data. Our code, data, and models can be found here https://github.com/mu-cai/svg-llm.

cs.CV↗

Quantitative Evaluation of the Saliency Map for Alzheimer's Disease Classifier with Anatomical Segmentation

Saliency maps have been widely used to interpret deep learning classifiers for Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, since AD is heterogeneous and has multiple subtypes, the pathological mechanism of AD remains not fully understood and may vary from patient to patient. Due to the lack of such understanding, it is difficult to comprehensively and effectively assess the saliency map of AD classifier. In this paper, we utilize the anatomical segmentation to allocate saliency values into different brain regions. By plotting the distributions of saliency maps corresponding to AD and NC (Normal Control), we can gain a comprehensive view of the model's decisions process. In order to leverage the fact that the brain volume shrinkage happens in AD patients during disease progression, we define a new evaluation metric, brain volume change score (VCS), by computing the average Pearson correlation of the brain volume changes and the saliency values of a model in different brain regions for each patient. Thus, the VCS metric can help us gain some knowledge of how saliency maps resulting from different models relate to the changes of the volumes across different regions in the whole brain. We trained candidate models on the ADNI dataset and tested on three different datasets. Our results indicate: (i) models with higher VCSs tend to demonstrate saliency maps with more details relevant to the AD pathology, (ii) using gradient-based adversarial training strategies such as FGSM and stochastic masking can improve the VCSs of the models.

cs.CV↗

Language Agent Tree Search Unifies Reasoning Acting and Planning in Language Models

While language models (LMs) have shown potential across a range of decision-making tasks, their reliance on simple acting processes limits their broad deployment as autonomous agents. In this paper, we introduce Language Agent Tree Search (LATS) -- the first general framework that synergizes the capabilities of LMs in reasoning, acting, and planning. By leveraging the in-context learning ability of LMs, we integrate Monte Carlo Tree Search into LATS to enable LMs as agents, along with LM-powered value functions and self-reflections for proficient exploration and enhanced decision-making. A key feature of our approach is the incorporation of an environment for external feedback, which offers a more deliberate and adaptive problem-solving mechanism that surpasses the constraints of existing techniques. Our experimental evaluation across diverse domains, including programming, interactive question-answering (QA), web navigation, and math, validates the effectiveness and generality of LATS in decision-making while maintaining competitive or improved reasoning performance. Notably, LATS achieves state-of-the-art pass@1 accuracy (92.7%) for programming on HumanEval with GPT-4 and demonstrates gradient-free performance (average score of 75.9) comparable to gradient-based fine-tuning for web navigation on WebShop with GPT-3.5. Code can be found at https://github.com/lapisrocks/LanguageAgentTreeSearch

cs.AI↗

From Tissue Plane to Organ World: A Benchmark Dataset for Multimodal Biomedical Image Registration using Deep Co-Attention Networks

Correlating neuropathology with neuroimaging findings provides a multiscale view of pathologic changes in the human organ spanning the meso- to micro-scales, and is an emerging methodology expected to shed light on numerous disease states. To gain the most information from this multimodal, multiscale approach, it is desirable to identify precisely where a histologic tissue section was taken from within the organ in order to correlate with the tissue features in exactly the same organ region. Histology-to-organ registration poses an extra challenge, as any given histologic section can capture only a small portion of a human organ. Making use of the capabilities of state-of-the-art deep learning models, we unlock the potential to address and solve such intricate challenges. Therefore, we create the ATOM benchmark dataset, sourced from diverse institutions, with the primary objective of transforming this challenge into a machine learning problem and delivering outstanding outcomes that enlighten the biomedical community. The performance of our RegisMCAN model demonstrates the potential of deep learning to accurately predict where a subregion extracted from an organ image was obtained from within the overall 3D volume. The code and dataset can be found at: https://github.com/haizailache999/Image-Registration/tree/main

cs.LG↗

Jailbreaking Large Language Models Against Moderation Guardrails via Cipher Characters

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically harmless but remain vulnerable to carefully crafted prompts known as ``jailbreaks'', which can bypass protective measures and induce harmful behavior. Recent advancements in LLMs have incorporated moderation guardrails that can filter outputs, which trigger processing errors for certain malicious questions. Existing red-teaming benchmarks often neglect to include questions that trigger moderation guardrails, making it difficult to evaluate jailbreak effectiveness. To address this issue, we introduce JAMBench, a harmful behavior benchmark designed to trigger and evaluate moderation guardrails. JAMBench involves 160 manually crafted instructions covering four major risk categories at multiple severity levels. Furthermore, we propose a jailbreak method, JAM (Jailbreak Against Moderation), designed to attack moderation guardrails using jailbreak prefixes to bypass input-level filters and a fine-tuned shadow model functionally equivalent to the guardrail model to generate cipher characters to bypass output-level filters. Our extensive experiments on four LLMs demonstrate that JAM achieves higher jailbreak success ($\sim$ $\times$ 19.88) and lower filtered-out rates ($\sim$ $\times$ 1/6) than baselines.

cs.CR↗