arXiv subjects

Zenan Li

Publications and source records attributed to Zenan Li.

43 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Convergence Analysis of Randomized SGDA under NC-PL Condition for Stochastic Minimax Optimization Problems

We introduce a new analytic framework to analyze the convergence of the Randomized Stochastic Gradient Descent Ascent (RSGDA) algorithm for stochastic minimax optimization problems. Under the so-called NC-PL condition on one of the variables, our analysis improves the state-of-the-art convergence results in the current literature and hence broadens the applicable range of the RSGDA. We also introduce a simple yet effective strategy to accelerate RSGDA , and empirically validate its efficiency on both synthetic data and real data.

math.OC↗

arXiv2023

NodeFormer: A Scalable Graph Structure Learning Transformer for Node Classification

Graph neural networks have been extensively studied for learning with inter-connected data. Despite this, recent evidence has revealed GNNs' deficiencies related to over-squashing, heterophily, handling long-range dependencies, edge incompleteness and particularly, the absence of graphs altogether. While a plausible solution is to learn new adaptive topology for message passing, issues concerning quadratic complexity hinder simultaneous guarantees for scalability and precision in large networks. In this paper, we introduce a novel all-pair message passing scheme for efficiently propagating node signals between arbitrary nodes, as an important building block for a pioneering Transformer-style network for node classification on large graphs, dubbed as \textsc{NodeFormer}. Specifically, the efficient computation is enabled by a kernerlized Gumbel-Softmax operator that reduces the algorithmic complexity to linearity w.r.t. node numbers for learning latent graph structures from large, potentially fully-connected graphs in a differentiable manner. We also provide accompanying theory as justification for our design. Extensive experiments demonstrate the promising efficacy of the method in various tasks including node classification on graphs (with up to 2M nodes) and graph-enhanced applications (e.g., image classification) where input graphs are missing.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

On Collective Robustness of Bagging Against Data Poisoning

Bootstrap aggregating (bagging) is an effective ensemble protocol, which is believed can enhance robustness by its majority voting mechanism. Recent works further prove the sample-wise robustness certificates for certain forms of bagging (e.g. partition aggregation). Beyond these particular forms, in this paper, \emph{we propose the first collective certification for general bagging to compute the tight robustness against the global poisoning attack}. Specifically, we compute the maximum number of simultaneously changed predictions via solving a binary integer linear programming (BILP) problem. Then we analyze the robustness of vanilla bagging and give the upper bound of the tolerable poison budget. Based on this analysis, \emph{we propose hash bagging} to improve the robustness of vanilla bagging almost for free. This is achieved by modifying the random subsampling in vanilla bagging to a hash-based deterministic subsampling, as a way of controlling the influence scope for each poisoning sample universally. Our extensive experiments show the notable advantage in terms of applicability and robustness.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

A General Framework for Evaluating Robustness of Combinatorial Optimization Solvers on Graphs

Solving combinatorial optimization (CO) on graphs is among the fundamental tasks for upper-stream applications in data mining, machine learning and operations research. Despite the inherent NP-hard challenge for CO, heuristics, branch-and-bound, learning-based solvers are developed to tackle CO problems as accurately as possible given limited time budgets. However, a practical metric for the sensitivity of CO solvers remains largely unexplored. Existing theoretical metrics require the optimal solution which is infeasible, and the gradient-based adversarial attack metric from deep learning is not compatible with non-learning solvers that are usually non-differentiable. In this paper, we develop the first practically feasible robustness metric for general combinatorial optimization solvers. We develop a no worse optimal cost guarantee thus do not require optimal solutions, and we tackle the non-differentiable challenge by resorting to black-box adversarial attack methods. Extensive experiments are conducted on 14 unique combinations of solvers and CO problems, and we demonstrate that the performance of state-of-the-art solvers like Gurobi can degenerate by over 20% under the given time limit bound on the hard instances discovered by our robustness metric, raising concerns about the robustness of combinatorial optimization solvers.

math.OC↗

arXiv2021

Joint Distribution across Representation Space for Out-of-Distribution Detection

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become a key part of many modern software applications. After training and validating, the DNN is deployed as an irrevocable component and applied in real-world scenarios. Although most DNNs are built meticulously with huge volumes of training data, data in the real world still remain unknown to the DNN model, which leads to the crucial requirement of runtime out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. However, many existing approaches 1) need OOD data for classifier training or parameter tuning, or 2) simply combine the scores of each hidden layer as an ensemble of features for OOD detection. In this paper, we present a novel outlook on in-distribution data in a generative manner, which takes their latent features generated from each hidden layer as a joint distribution across representation spaces. Since only the in-distribution latent features are comprehensively understood in representation space, the internal difference between in-distribution and OOD data can be naturally revealed without the intervention of any OOD data. Specifically, We construct a generative model, called Latent Sequential Gaussian Mixture (LSGM), to depict how the in-distribution latent features are generated in terms of the trace of DNN inference across representation spaces. We first construct the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) based on in-distribution latent features for each hidden layer, and then connect GMMs via the transition probabilities of the inference traces. Experimental evaluations on popular benchmark OOD datasets and models validate the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art methods in OOD detection.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Operational Calibration: Debugging Confidence Errors for DNNs in the Field

Trained DNN models are increasingly adopted as integral parts of software systems, but they often perform deficiently in the field. A particularly damaging problem is that DNN models often give false predictions with high confidence, due to the unavoidable slight divergences between operation data and training data. To minimize the loss caused by inaccurate confidence, operational calibration, i.e., calibrating the confidence function of a DNN classifier against its operation domain, becomes a necessary debugging step in the engineering of the whole system. Operational calibration is difficult considering the limited budget of labeling operation data and the weak interpretability of DNN models. We propose a Bayesian approach to operational calibration that gradually corrects the confidence given by the model under calibration with a small number of labeled operation data deliberately selected from a larger set of unlabeled operation data. The approach is made effective and efficient by leveraging the locality of the learned representation of the DNN model and modeling the calibration as Gaussian Process Regression. Comprehensive experiments with various practical datasets and DNN models show that it significantly outperformed alternative methods, and in some difficult tasks it eliminated about 71% to 97% high-confidence (>0.9) errors with only about 10\% of the minimal amount of labeled operation data needed for practical learning techniques to barely work.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Boosting Operational DNN Testing Efficiency through Conditioning

With the increasing adoption of Deep Neural Network (DNN) models as integral parts of software systems, efficient operational testing of DNNs is much in demand to ensure these models' actual performance in field conditions. A challenge is that the testing often needs to produce precise results with a very limited budget for labeling data collected in field. Viewing software testing as a practice of reliability estimation through statistical sampling, we re-interpret the idea behind conventional structural coverages as conditioning for variance reduction. With this insight we propose an efficient DNN testing method based on the conditioning on the representation learned by the DNN model under testing. The representation is defined by the probability distribution of the output of neurons in the last hidden layer of the model. To sample from this high dimensional distribution in which the operational data are sparsely distributed, we design an algorithm leveraging cross entropy minimization. Experiments with various DNN models and datasets were conducted to evaluate the general efficiency of the approach. The results show that, compared with simple random sampling, this approach requires only about a half of labeled inputs to achieve the same level of precision.

cs.SE↗