arXiv subjects

Sangdon Park

Publications and source records attributed to Sangdon Park.

35 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Unlearn to Relearn Backdoors: Deferred Backdoor Functionality Attacks on Deep Learning Models

Deep learning models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where adversaries inject malicious functionality during training that activates on trigger inputs at inference time. Extensive research has focused on developing stealthy backdoor attacks to evade detection and defense mechanisms. However, these approaches still have limitations that leave the door open for detection and mitigation due to their inherent design to cause malicious behavior in the presence of a trigger. To address this limitation, we introduce Deferred Activated Backdoor Functionality (DABF), a new paradigm in backdoor attacks. Unlike conventional attacks, DABF initially conceals its backdoor, producing benign outputs even when triggered. This stealthy behavior allows DABF to bypass multiple detection and defense methods, remaining undetected during initial inspections. The backdoor functionality is strategically activated only after the model undergoes subsequent updates, such as retraining on benign data. DABF attacks exploit the common practice in the life cycle of machine learning models to perform model updates and fine-tuning after initial deployment. To implement DABF attacks, we approach the problem by making the unlearning of the backdoor fragile, allowing it to be easily cancelled and subsequently reactivate the backdoor functionality. To achieve this, we propose a novel two-stage training scheme, called DeferBad. Our extensive experiments across various fine-tuning scenarios, backdoor attack types, datasets, and model architectures demonstrate the effectiveness and stealthiness of DeferBad.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Uncertainty Quantification for Neurosymbolic Programs via Compositional Conformal Prediction

Machine learning has become an effective tool for automatically annotating unstructured data (e.g., images) with structured labels (e.g., object detections). As a result, a new programming paradigm called neurosymbolic programming has emerged where users write queries against these predicted annotations. However, due to the intrinsic fallibility of machine learning models, these programs currently lack any notion of correctness. In many domains, users may want some kind of conservative guarantee that the results of their queries contain all possibly relevant instances. Conformal prediction has emerged as a promising strategy for quantifying uncertainty in machine learning by modifying models to predict sets of labels instead of individual labels; it provides a probabilistic guarantee that the prediction set contains the true label with high probability. We propose a novel framework for adapting conformal prediction to neurosymbolic programs; our strategy is to represent prediction sets as abstract values in some abstract domain, and then to use abstract interpretation to propagate prediction sets through the program. Our strategy satisfies three key desiderata: (i) correctness (i.e., the program outputs a prediction set that contains the true output with high probability), (ii) compositionality (i.e., we can quantify uncertainty separately for different modules and then compose them together), and (iii) structured values (i.e., we can provide uncertainty quantification for structured values such as lists). When the full program is available ahead-of-time, we propose an optimization that incorporates conformal prediction at intermediate program points to reduce imprecision in abstract interpretation. We evaluate our approach on programs that take MNIST and MS-COCO images as input, demonstrating that it produces reasonably sized prediction sets while satisfying a coverage guarantee.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2024

TRAQ: Trustworthy Retrieval Augmented Question Answering via Conformal Prediction

When applied to open-domain question answering, large language models (LLMs) frequently generate incorrect responses based on made-up facts, which are called $\textit{hallucinations}$. Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is a promising strategy to avoid hallucinations, but it does not provide guarantees on its correctness. To address this challenge, we propose the Trustworthy Retrieval Augmented Question Answering, or $\textit{TRAQ}$, which provides the first end-to-end statistical correctness guarantee for RAG. TRAQ uses conformal prediction, a statistical technique for constructing prediction sets that are guaranteed to contain the semantically correct response with high probability. Additionally, TRAQ leverages Bayesian optimization to minimize the size of the constructed sets. In an extensive experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that TRAQ provides the desired correctness guarantee while reducing prediction set size by 16.2% on average compared to an ablation. The implementation is available at $\href{https://github.com/shuoli90/TRAQ.git}{TRAQ}$.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

MedBN: Robust Test-Time Adaptation against Malicious Test Samples

Test-time adaptation (TTA) has emerged as a promising solution to address performance decay due to unforeseen distribution shifts between training and test data. While recent TTA methods excel in adapting to test data variations, such adaptability exposes a model to vulnerability against malicious examples, an aspect that has received limited attention. Previous studies have uncovered security vulnerabilities within TTA even when a small proportion of the test batch is maliciously manipulated. In response to the emerging threat, we propose median batch normalization (MedBN), leveraging the robustness of the median for statistics estimation within the batch normalization layer during test-time inference. Our method is algorithm-agnostic, thus allowing seamless integration with existing TTA frameworks. Our experimental results on benchmark datasets, including CIFAR10-C, CIFAR100-C and ImageNet-C, consistently demonstrate that MedBN outperforms existing approaches in maintaining robust performance across different attack scenarios, encompassing both instant and cumulative attacks. Through extensive experiments, we show that our approach sustains the performance even in the absence of attacks, achieving a practical balance between robustness and performance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

PAC Prediction Sets Under Label Shift

Prediction sets capture uncertainty by predicting sets of labels rather than individual labels, enabling downstream decisions to conservatively account for all plausible outcomes. Conformal inference algorithms construct prediction sets guaranteed to contain the true label with high probability. These guarantees fail to hold in the face of distribution shift, which is precisely when reliable uncertainty quantification can be most useful. We propose a novel algorithm for constructing prediction sets with PAC guarantees in the label shift setting. This method estimates the predicted probabilities of the classes in a target domain, as well as the confusion matrix, then propagates uncertainty in these estimates through a Gaussian elimination algorithm to compute confidence intervals for importance weights. Finally, it uses these intervals to construct prediction sets. We evaluate our approach on five datasets: the CIFAR-10, ChestX-Ray and Entity-13 image datasets, the tabular CDC Heart dataset, and the AGNews text dataset. Our algorithm satisfies the PAC guarantee while producing smaller, more informative, prediction sets compared to several baselines.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2023

ACon$^2$: Adaptive Conformal Consensus for Provable Blockchain Oracles

Blockchains with smart contracts are distributed ledger systems that achieve block-state consistency among distributed nodes by only allowing deterministic operations of smart contracts. However, the power of smart contracts is enabled by interacting with stochastic off-chain data, which in turn opens the possibility to undermine the block-state consistency. To address this issue, an oracle smart contract is used to provide a single consistent source of external data; but, simultaneously, this introduces a single point of failure, which is called the oracle problem. To address the oracle problem, we propose an adaptive conformal consensus (ACon$^2$) algorithm that derives a consensus set of data from multiple oracle contracts via the recent advance in online uncertainty quantification learning. Interesting, the consensus set provides a desired correctness guarantee under distribution shift and Byzantine adversaries. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm on two price datasets and an Ethereum case study. In particular, the Solidity implementation of the proposed algorithm shows the potential practicality of the proposed algorithm, implying that online machine learning algorithms are applicable to address security issues in blockchains.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

PAC Prediction Sets for Meta-Learning

Uncertainty quantification is a key component of machine learning models targeted at safety-critical systems such as in healthcare or autonomous vehicles. We study this problem in the context of meta learning, where the goal is to quickly adapt a predictor to new tasks. In particular, we propose a novel algorithm to construct \emph{PAC prediction sets}, which capture uncertainty via sets of labels, that can be adapted to new tasks with only a few training examples. These prediction sets satisfy an extension of the typical PAC guarantee to the meta learning setting; in particular, the PAC guarantee holds with high probability over future tasks. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on four datasets across three application domains: mini-ImageNet and CIFAR10-C in the visual domain, FewRel in the language domain, and the CDC Heart Dataset in the medical domain. In particular, our prediction sets satisfy the PAC guarantee while having smaller size compared to other baselines that also satisfy this guarantee.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

CODiT: Conformal Out-of-Distribution Detection in Time-Series Data

Machine learning models are prone to making incorrect predictions on inputs that are far from the training distribution. This hinders their deployment in safety-critical applications such as autonomous vehicles and healthcare. The detection of a shift from the training distribution of individual datapoints has gained attention. A number of techniques have been proposed for such out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. But in many applications, the inputs to a machine learning model form a temporal sequence. Existing techniques for OOD detection in time-series data either do not exploit temporal relationships in the sequence or do not provide any guarantees on detection. We propose using deviation from the in-distribution temporal equivariance as the non-conformity measure in conformal anomaly detection framework for OOD detection in time-series data.Computing independent predictions from multiple conformal detectors based on the proposed measure and combining these predictions by Fisher's method leads to the proposed detector CODiT with guarantees on false detection in time-series data. We illustrate the efficacy of CODiT by achieving state-of-the-art results on computer vision datasets in autonomous driving. We also show that CODiT can be used for OOD detection in non-vision datasets by performing experiments on the physiological GAIT sensory dataset. Code, data, and trained models are available at https://github.com/kaustubhsridhar/time-series-OOD.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Towards PAC Multi-Object Detection and Tracking

Accurately detecting and tracking multi-objects is important for safety-critical applications such as autonomous navigation. However, it remains challenging to provide guarantees on the performance of state-of-the-art techniques based on deep learning. We consider a strategy known as conformal prediction, which predicts sets of labels instead of a single label; in the classification and regression settings, these algorithms can guarantee that the true label lies within the prediction set with high probability. Building on these ideas, we propose multi-object detection and tracking algorithms that come with probably approximately correct (PAC) guarantees. They do so by constructing both a prediction set around each object detection as well as around the set of edge transitions; given an object, the detection prediction set contains its true bounding box with high probability, and the edge prediction set contains its true transition across frames with high probability. We empirically demonstrate that our method can detect and track objects with PAC guarantees on the COCO and MOT-17 datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

PAC Prediction Sets Under Covariate Shift

An important challenge facing modern machine learning is how to rigorously quantify the uncertainty of model predictions. Conveying uncertainty is especially important when there are changes to the underlying data distribution that might invalidate the predictive model. Yet, most existing uncertainty quantification algorithms break down in the presence of such shifts. We propose a novel approach that addresses this challenge by constructing \emph{probably approximately correct (PAC)} prediction sets in the presence of covariate shift. Our approach focuses on the setting where there is a covariate shift from the source distribution (where we have labeled training examples) to the target distribution (for which we want to quantify uncertainty). Our algorithm assumes given importance weights that encode how the probabilities of the training examples change under the covariate shift. In practice, importance weights typically need to be estimated; thus, we extend our algorithm to the setting where we are given confidence intervals for the importance weights. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on covariate shifts based on DomainNet and ImageNet. Our algorithm satisfies the PAC constraint, and gives prediction sets with the smallest average normalized size among approaches that always satisfy the PAC constraint.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

iDECODe: In-distribution Equivariance for Conformal Out-of-distribution Detection

Machine learning methods such as deep neural networks (DNNs), despite their success across different domains, are known to often generate incorrect predictions with high confidence on inputs outside their training distribution. The deployment of DNNs in safety-critical domains requires detection of out-of-distribution (OOD) data so that DNNs can abstain from making predictions on those. A number of methods have been recently developed for OOD detection, but there is still room for improvement. We propose the new method iDECODe, leveraging in-distribution equivariance for conformal OOD detection. It relies on a novel base non-conformity measure and a new aggregation method, used in the inductive conformal anomaly detection framework, thereby guaranteeing a bounded false detection rate. We demonstrate the efficacy of iDECODe by experiments on image and audio datasets, obtaining state-of-the-art results. We also show that iDECODe can detect adversarial examples.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Detecting OODs as datapoints with High Uncertainty

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known to produce incorrect predictions with very high confidence on out-of-distribution inputs (OODs). This limitation is one of the key challenges in the adoption of DNNs in high-assurance systems such as autonomous driving, air traffic management, and medical diagnosis. This challenge has received significant attention recently, and several techniques have been developed to detect inputs where the model's prediction cannot be trusted. These techniques detect OODs as datapoints with either high epistemic uncertainty or high aleatoric uncertainty. We demonstrate the difference in the detection ability of these techniques and propose an ensemble approach for detection of OODs as datapoints with high uncertainty (epistemic or aleatoric). We perform experiments on vision datasets with multiple DNN architectures, achieving state-of-the-art results in most cases.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

PAC Confidence Predictions for Deep Neural Network Classifiers

A key challenge for deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) in safety critical settings is the need to provide rigorous ways to quantify their uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for constructing predicted classification confidences for DNNs that comes with provable correctness guarantees. Our approach uses Clopper-Pearson confidence intervals for the Binomial distribution in conjunction with the histogram binning approach to calibrated prediction. In addition, we demonstrate how our predicted confidences can be used to enable downstream guarantees in two settings: (i) fast DNN inference, where we demonstrate how to compose a fast but inaccurate DNN with an accurate but slow DNN in a rigorous way to improve performance without sacrificing accuracy, and (ii) safe planning, where we guarantee safety when using a DNN to predict whether a given action is safe based on visual observations. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our approach can be used to provide guarantees for state-of-the-art DNNs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Calibrated Prediction with Covariate Shift via Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Reliable uncertainty estimates are an important tool for helping autonomous agents or human decision makers understand and leverage predictive models. However, existing approaches to estimating uncertainty largely ignore the possibility of covariate shift--i.e., where the real-world data distribution may differ from the training distribution. As a consequence, existing algorithms can overestimate certainty, possibly yielding a false sense of confidence in the predictive model. We propose an algorithm for calibrating predictions that accounts for the possibility of covariate shift, given labeled examples from the training distribution and unlabeled examples from the real-world distribution. Our algorithm uses importance weighting to correct for the shift from the training to the real-world distribution. However, importance weighting relies on the training and real-world distributions to be sufficiently close. Building on ideas from domain adaptation, we additionally learn a feature map that tries to equalize these two distributions. In an empirical evaluation, we show that our proposed approach outperforms existing approaches to calibrated prediction when there is covariate shift.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Joint Orthogonal Band and Power Allocation for Energy Fairness in WPT System with Nonlinear Logarithmic Energy Harvesting Model

Wireless power transmission (WPT) is expected to play an important role in the Internet of Things services by providing the perpetual operation of IoT sensors. However, to prolong the IoT network's lifetime, the efficient resource allocation algorithm is required, in particular, the energy fairness issue among IoT sensors has been a critical challenge of the WPT system. In this paper, considering energy fairness as the minimum received energy of all energy poverty IoT sensors (EPISs), we allocate orthogonal frequency bands to several EPISs and transfer the RF power on each orthogonal band, using energy beamforming. Based on the energy poverty, we propose orthogonal frequency bands assignment rule, granting the priority to the EPISs with less received energy. We also formulate two transmission power allocation problems, incorporated the nonlinear logarithm-energy harvesting (EH) model. First, the total received power maximization (TRPM) problem is presented and solved by combining the well-known Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions with the modified water-filling algorithm. Second, the common received power maximization (CRPM) problem is formulated and the optimal solution is derived using the iterative bisection search method. To apply the bisection search method to the problem, this paper proposes a method of specifying the scope of the solution for the objective function defined by the sum of monotonous functions. In numerical results, assuming the mobility of EPISs by the one-dimensional random walk model, the effectiveness of the mobility of EPISs on the minimum received energy of all EPISs is presented. Finally, the performance of the proposed resource allocation schemes is verified by comparing other resources allocation schemes, such as Round robin and equal power distribution

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

PAC Confidence Sets for Deep Neural Networks via Calibrated Prediction

We propose an algorithm combining calibrated prediction and generalization bounds from learning theory to construct confidence sets for deep neural networks with PAC guarantees---i.e., the confidence set for a given input contains the true label with high probability. We demonstrate how our approach can be used to construct PAC confidence sets on ResNet for ImageNet, a visual object tracking model, and a dynamics model for the half-cheetah reinforcement learning problem.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

Resilient Linear Classification: An Approach to Deal with Attacks on Training Data

Data-driven techniques are used in cyber-physical systems (CPS) for controlling autonomous vehicles, handling demand responses for energy management, and modeling human physiology for medical devices. These data-driven techniques extract models from training data, where their performance is often analyzed with respect to random errors in the training data. However, if the training data is maliciously altered by attackers, the effect of these attacks on the learning algorithms underpinning data-driven CPS have yet to be considered. In this paper, we analyze the resilience of classification algorithms to training data attacks. Specifically, a generic metric is proposed that is tailored to measure resilience of classification algorithms with respect to worst-case tampering of the training data. Using the metric, we show that traditional linear classification algorithms are resilient under restricted conditions. To overcome these limitations, we propose a linear classification algorithm with a majority constraint and prove that it is strictly more resilient than the traditional algorithms. Evaluations on both synthetic data and a real-world retrospective arrhythmia medical case-study show that the traditional algorithms are vulnerable to tampered training data, whereas the proposed algorithm is more resilient (as measured by worst-case tampering).

cs.LG↗