arXiv subjects

Pin-Yu Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Pin-Yu Chen.

At least 217 records · Page 12Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Make an Omelette with Breaking Eggs: Zero-Shot Learning for Novel Attribute Synthesis

Most of the existing algorithms for zero-shot classification problems typically rely on the attribute-based semantic relations among categories to realize the classification of novel categories without observing any of their instances. However, training the zero-shot classification models still requires attribute labeling for each class (or even instance) in the training dataset, which is also expensive. To this end, in this paper, we bring up a new problem scenario: "Can we derive zero-shot learning for novel attribute detectors/classifiers and use them to automatically annotate the dataset for labeling efficiency?". Basically, given only a small set of detectors that are learned to recognize some manually annotated attributes (i.e., the seen attributes), we aim to synthesize the detectors of novel attributes in a zero-shot learning manner. Our proposed method, Zero-Shot Learning for Attributes (ZSLA), which is the first of its kind to the best of our knowledge, tackles this new research problem by applying the set operations to first decompose the seen attributes into their basic attributes and then recombine these basic attributes into the novel ones. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the capacity of our synthesized detectors for accurately capturing the semantics of the novel attributes and show their superior performance in terms of detection and localization compared to other baseline approaches. Moreover, we demonstrate the application of automatic annotation using our synthesized detectors on Caltech-UCSD Birds-200-2011 dataset. Various generalized zero-shot classification algorithms trained upon the dataset re-annotated by ZSLA show comparable performance with those trained with the manual ground-truth annotations. Please refer to our project page for source code: https://yuhsuanli.github.io/ZSLA/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

On the Adversarial Robustness of Vision Transformers

Following the success in advancing natural language processing and understanding, transformers are expected to bring revolutionary changes to computer vision. This work provides a comprehensive study on the robustness of vision transformers (ViTs) against adversarial perturbations. Tested on various white-box and transfer attack settings, we find that ViTs possess better adversarial robustness when compared with MLP-Mixer and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) including ConvNeXt, and this observation also holds for certified robustness. Through frequency analysis and feature visualization, we summarize the following main observations contributing to the improved robustness of ViTs: 1) Features learned by ViTs contain less high-frequency patterns that have spurious correlation, which helps explain why ViTs are less sensitive to high-frequency perturbations than CNNs and MLP-Mixer, and there is a high correlation between how much the model learns high-frequency features and its robustness against different frequency-based perturbations. 2) Introducing convolutional or tokens-to-token blocks for learning high-frequency features in ViTs can improve classification accuracy but at the cost of adversarial robustness. 3) Modern CNN designs that borrow techniques from ViTs including activation function, layer norm, larger kernel size to imitate the global attention, and patchify the images as inputs, etc., could help bridge the performance gap between ViTs and CNNs not only in terms of performance, but also certified and empirical adversarial robustness. Moreover, we show adversarial training is also applicable to ViT for training robust models, and sharpness-aware minimization can also help improve robustness, while pre-training with clean images on larger datasets does not significantly improve adversarial robustness.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Inference and Denoise: Causal Inference-based Neural Speech Enhancement

This study addresses the speech enhancement (SE) task within the causal inference paradigm by modeling the noise presence as an intervention. Based on the potential outcome framework, the proposed causal inference-based speech enhancement (CISE) separates clean and noisy frames in an intervened noisy speech using a noise detector and assigns both sets of frames to two mask-based enhancement modules (EMs) to perform noise-conditional SE. Specifically, we use the presence of noise as guidance for EM selection during training, and the noise detector selects the enhancement module according to the prediction of the presence of noise for each frame. Moreover, we derived a SE-specific average treatment effect to quantify the causal effect adequately. Experimental evidence demonstrates that CISE outperforms a non-causal mask-based SE approach in the studied settings and has better performance and efficiency than more complex SE models.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2022

An Empirical Evaluation of Zeroth-Order Optimization Methods on AI-driven Molecule Optimization

Molecule optimization is an important problem in chemical discovery and has been approached using many techniques, including generative modeling, reinforcement learning, genetic algorithms, and much more. Recent work has also applied zeroth-order (ZO) optimization, a subset of gradient-free optimization that solves problems similarly to gradient-based methods, for optimizing latent vector representations from an autoencoder. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of various ZO optimization methods for optimizing molecular objectives, which are characterized by variable smoothness, infrequent optima, and other challenges. We provide insights on the robustness of various ZO optimizers in this setting, show the advantages of ZO sign-based gradient descent (ZO-signGD), discuss how ZO optimization can be used practically in realistic discovery tasks, and demonstrate the potential effectiveness of ZO optimization methods on widely used benchmark tasks from the Guacamol suite. Code is available at: https://github.com/IBM/QMO-bench.

q-bio.BM↗

arXiv2022

Theoretical Error Performance Analysis for Variational Quantum Circuit Based Functional Regression

The noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices enable the implementation of the variational quantum circuit (VQC) for quantum neural networks (QNN). Although the VQC-based QNN has succeeded in many machine learning tasks, the representation and generalization powers of VQC still require further investigation, particularly when the dimensionality of classical inputs is concerned. In this work, we first put forth an end-to-end quantum neural network, TTN-VQC, which consists of a quantum tensor network based on a tensor-train network (TTN) for dimensionality reduction and a VQC for functional regression. Then, we aim at the error performance analysis for the TTN-VQC in terms of representation and generalization powers. We also characterize the optimization properties of TTN-VQC by leveraging the Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) condition. Moreover, we conduct the experiments of functional regression on a handwritten digit classification dataset to justify our theoretical analysis.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

SynBench: Task-Agnostic Benchmarking of Pretrained Representations using Synthetic Data

Recent success in fine-tuning large models, that are pretrained on broad data at scale, on downstream tasks has led to a significant paradigm shift in deep learning, from task-centric model design to task-agnostic representation learning and task-specific fine-tuning. As the representations of pretrained models are used as a foundation for different downstream tasks, this paper proposes a new task-agnostic framework, \textit{SynBench}, to measure the quality of pretrained representations using synthetic data. We set up a reference by a theoretically-derived robustness-accuracy tradeoff of the class conditional Gaussian mixture. Given a pretrained model, the representations of data synthesized from the Gaussian mixture are used to compare with our reference to infer the quality. By comparing the ratio of area-under-curve between the raw data and their representations, SynBench offers a quantifiable score for robustness-accuracy performance benchmarking. Our framework applies to a wide range of pretrained models taking continuous data inputs and is independent of the downstream tasks and datasets. Evaluated with several pretrained vision transformer models, the experimental results show that our SynBench score well matches the actual linear probing performance of the pre-trained model when fine-tuned on downstream tasks. Moreover, our framework can be used to inform the design of robust linear probing on pretrained representations to mitigate the robustness-accuracy tradeoff in downstream tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Rethinking Normalization Methods in Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a popular distributed learning framework that can reduce privacy risks by not explicitly sharing private data. In this work, we explicitly uncover external covariate shift problem in FL, which is caused by the independent local training processes on different devices. We demonstrate that external covariate shifts will lead to the obliteration of some devices' contributions to the global model. Further, we show that normalization layers are indispensable in FL since their inherited properties can alleviate the problem of obliterating some devices' contributions. However, recent works have shown that batch normalization, which is one of the standard components in many deep neural networks, will incur accuracy drop of the global model in FL. The essential reason for the failure of batch normalization in FL is poorly studied. We unveil that external covariate shift is the key reason why batch normalization is ineffective in FL. We also show that layer normalization is a better choice in FL which can mitigate the external covariate shift and improve the performance of the global model. We conduct experiments on CIFAR10 under non-IID settings. The results demonstrate that models with layer normalization converge fastest and achieve the best or comparable accuracy for three different model architectures.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Iterative Qubits Management for Quantum Index Searching in a Hybrid System

Recent advances in quantum computing systems attract tremendous attention. Commercial companies, such as IBM, Amazon, and IonQ, have started to provide access to noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers. Researchers and entrepreneurs attempt to deploy their applications that aim to achieve a quantum speedup. Grover's algorithm and quantum phase estimation are the foundations of many applications with the potential for such a speedup. While these algorithms, in theory, obtain marvelous performance, deploying them on existing quantum devices is a challenging task. For example, quantum phase estimation requires extra qubits and a large number of controlled operations, which are impractical due to low-qubit and noisy hardware. To fully utilize the limited onboard qubits, we propose IQuCS, which aims at index searching and counting in a quantum-classical hybrid system. IQuCS is based on Grover's algorithm. From the problem size perspective, it analyzes results and tries to filter out unlikely data points iteratively. A reduced data set is fed to the quantum computer in the next iteration. With a reduction in the problem size, IQuCS requires fewer qubits iteratively, which provides the potential for a shared computing environment. We implement IQuCS with Qiskit and conduct intensive experiments. The results demonstrate that it reduces qubits consumption by up to 66.2%.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Distributed Adversarial Training to Robustify Deep Neural Networks at Scale

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 https://github.com/dat-2022/dat.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Be Your Own Neighborhood: Detecting Adversarial Example by the Neighborhood Relations Built on Self-Supervised Learning

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved excellent performance in various fields. However, DNNs' vulnerability to Adversarial Examples (AE) hinders their deployments to safety-critical applications. This paper presents a novel AE detection framework, named BEYOND, for trustworthy predictions. BEYOND performs the detection by distinguishing the AE's abnormal relation with its augmented versions, i.e. neighbors, from two prospects: representation similarity and label consistency. An off-the-shelf Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) model is used to extract the representation and predict the label for its highly informative representation capacity compared to supervised learning models. For clean samples, their representations and predictions are closely consistent with their neighbors, whereas those of AEs differ greatly. Furthermore, we explain this observation and show that by leveraging this discrepancy BEYOND can effectively detect AEs. We develop a rigorous justification for the effectiveness of BEYOND. Furthermore, as a plug-and-play model, BEYOND can easily cooperate with the Adversarial Trained Classifier (ATC), achieving the state-of-the-art (SOTA) robustness accuracy. Experimental results show that BEYOND outperforms baselines by a large margin, especially under adaptive attacks. Empowered by the robust relation net built on SSL, we found that BEYOND outperforms baselines in terms of both detection ability and speed. Our code will be publicly available.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Sharp-MAML: Sharpness-Aware Model-Agnostic Meta Learning

Model-agnostic meta learning (MAML) is currently one of the dominating approaches for few-shot meta-learning. Albeit its effectiveness, the optimization of MAML can be challenging due to the innate bilevel problem structure. Specifically, the loss landscape of MAML is much more complex with possibly more saddle points and local minimizers than its empirical risk minimization counterpart. To address this challenge, we leverage the recently invented sharpness-aware minimization and develop a sharpness-aware MAML approach that we term Sharp-MAML. We empirically demonstrate that Sharp-MAML and its computation-efficient variant can outperform the plain-vanilla MAML baseline (e.g., $+3\%$ accuracy on Mini-Imagenet). We complement the empirical study with the convergence rate analysis and the generalization bound of Sharp-MAML. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical and theoretical study on sharpness-aware minimization in the context of bilevel learning. The code is available at https://github.com/mominabbass/Sharp-MAML.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Active Sampling of Multiple Sources for Sequential Estimation

Consider $K$ processes, each generating a sequence of identical and independent random variables. The probability measures of these processes have random parameters that must be estimated. Specifically, they share a parameter $θ$ common to all probability measures. Additionally, each process $i\in\{1, \dots, K\}$ has a private parameter $α_i$. The objective is to design an active sampling algorithm for sequentially estimating these parameters in order to form reliable estimates for all shared and private parameters with the fewest number of samples. This sampling algorithm has three key components: (i)~data-driven sampling decisions, which dynamically over time specifies which of the $K$ processes should be selected for sampling; (ii)~stopping time for the process, which specifies when the accumulated data is sufficient to form reliable estimates and terminate the sampling process; and (iii)~estimators for all shared and private parameters. Owing to the sequential estimation being known to be analytically intractable, this paper adopts \emph {conditional} estimation cost functions, leading to a sequential estimation approach that was recently shown to render tractable analysis. Asymptotically optimal decision rules (sampling, stopping, and estimation) are delineated, and numerical experiments are provided to compare the efficacy and quality of the proposed procedure with those of the relevant approaches.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Benchmarking Machine Learning Robustness in Covid-19 Genome Sequence Classification

The rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented amount of sequence data of the SARS-CoV-2 genome -- millions of sequences and counting. This amount of data, while being orders of magnitude beyond the capacity of traditional approaches to understanding the diversity, dynamics, and evolution of viruses is nonetheless a rich resource for machine learning (ML) approaches as alternatives for extracting such important information from these data. It is of hence utmost importance to design a framework for testing and benchmarking the robustness of these ML models. This paper makes the first effort (to our knowledge) to benchmark the robustness of ML models by simulating biological sequences with errors. In this paper, we introduce several ways to perturb SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences to mimic the error profiles of common sequencing platforms such as Illumina and PacBio. We show from experiments on a wide array of ML models that some simulation-based approaches are more robust (and accurate) than others for specific embedding methods to certain adversarial attacks to the input sequences. Our benchmarking framework may assist researchers in properly assessing different ML models and help them understand the behavior of the SARS-CoV-2 virus or avoid possible future pandemics.

q-bio.GN↗

arXiv2022

CARBEN: Composite Adversarial Robustness Benchmark

Prior literature on adversarial attack methods has mainly focused on attacking with and defending against a single threat model, e.g., perturbations bounded in Lp ball. However, multiple threat models can be combined into composite perturbations. One such approach, composite adversarial attack (CAA), not only expands the perturbable space of the image, but also may be overlooked by current modes of robustness evaluation. This paper demonstrates how CAA's attack order affects the resulting image, and provides real-time inferences of different models, which will facilitate users' configuration of the parameters of the attack level and their rapid evaluation of model prediction. A leaderboard to benchmark adversarial robustness against CAA is also introduced.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

A Word is Worth A Thousand Dollars: Adversarial Attack on Tweets Fools Stock Predictions

More and more investors and machine learning models rely on social media (e.g., Twitter and Reddit) to gather real-time information and sentiment to predict stock price movements. Although text-based models are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, whether stock prediction models have similar vulnerability is underexplored. In this paper, we experiment with a variety of adversarial attack configurations to fool three stock prediction victim models. We address the task of adversarial generation by solving combinatorial optimization problems with semantics and budget constraints. Our results show that the proposed attack method can achieve consistent success rates and cause significant monetary loss in trading simulation by simply concatenating a perturbed but semantically similar tweet.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

On Certifying and Improving Generalization to Unseen Domains

Domain Generalization (DG) aims to learn models whose performance remains high on unseen domains encountered at test-time by using data from multiple related source domains. Many existing DG algorithms reduce the divergence between source distributions in a representation space to potentially align the unseen domain close to the sources. This is motivated by the analysis that explains generalization to unseen domains using distributional distance (such as the Wasserstein distance) to the sources. However, due to the openness of the DG objective, it is challenging to evaluate DG algorithms comprehensively using a few benchmark datasets. In particular, we demonstrate that the accuracy of the models trained with DG methods varies significantly across unseen domains, generated from popular benchmark datasets. This highlights that the performance of DG methods on a few benchmark datasets may not be representative of their performance on unseen domains in the wild. To overcome this roadblock, we propose a universal certification framework based on distributionally robust optimization (DRO) that can efficiently certify the worst-case performance of any DG method. This enables a data-independent evaluation of a DG method complementary to the empirical evaluations on benchmark datasets. Furthermore, we propose a training algorithm that can be used with any DG method to provably improve their certified performance. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our method at significantly improving the worst-case loss (i.e., reducing the risk of failure of these models in the wild) without incurring a significant performance drop on benchmark datasets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Linearity Grafting: Relaxed Neuron Pruning Helps Certifiable Robustness

Certifiable robustness is a highly desirable property for adopting deep neural networks (DNNs) in safety-critical scenarios, but often demands tedious computations to establish. The main hurdle lies in the massive amount of non-linearity in large DNNs. To trade off the DNN expressiveness (which calls for more non-linearity) and robustness certification scalability (which prefers more linearity), we propose a novel solution to strategically manipulate neurons, by "grafting" appropriate levels of linearity. The core of our proposal is to first linearize insignificant ReLU neurons, to eliminate the non-linear components that are both redundant for DNN performance and harmful to its certification. We then optimize the associated slopes and intercepts of the replaced linear activations for restoring model performance while maintaining certifiability. Hence, typical neuron pruning could be viewed as a special case of grafting a linear function of the fixed zero slopes and intercept, that might overly restrict the network flexibility and sacrifice its performance. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and network backbones show that our linearity grafting can (1) effectively tighten certified bounds; (2) achieve competitive certifiable robustness without certified robust training (i.e., over 30% improvements on CIFAR-10 models); and (3) scale up complete verification to large adversarially trained models with 17M parameters. Codes are available at https://github.com/VITA-Group/Linearity-Grafting.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Towards Creativity Characterization of Generative Models via Group-based Subset Scanning

Deep generative models, such as Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), have been employed widely in computational creativity research. However, such models discourage out-of-distribution generation to avoid spurious sample generation, thereby limiting their creativity. Thus, incorporating research on human creativity into generative deep learning techniques presents an opportunity to make their outputs more compelling and human-like. As we see the emergence of generative models directed toward creativity research, a need for machine learning-based surrogate metrics to characterize creative output from these models is imperative. We propose group-based subset scanning to identify, quantify, and characterize creative processes by detecting a subset of anomalous node-activations in the hidden layers of the generative models. Our experiments on the standard image benchmarks, and their "creatively generated" variants, reveal that the proposed subset scores distribution is more useful for detecting creative processes in the activation space rather than the pixel space. Further, we found that creative samples generate larger subsets of anomalies than normal or non-creative samples across datasets. The node activations highlighted during the creative decoding process are different from those responsible for the normal sample generation. Lastly, we assess if the images from the subsets selected by our method were also found creative by human evaluators, presenting a link between creativity perception in humans and node activations within deep neural nets.

cs.CV↗