arXiv subjects

Zhou Lu

Publications and source records attributed to Zhou Lu.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

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↗

arXiv2021

A Note on the Representation Power of GHHs

In this note we prove a sharp lower bound on the necessary number of nestings of nested absolute-value functions of generalized hinging hyperplanes (GHH) to represent arbitrary CPWL functions. Previous upper bound states that $n+1$ nestings is sufficient for GHH to achieve universal representation power, but the corresponding lower bound was unknown. We prove that $n$ nestings is necessary for universal representation power, which provides an almost tight lower bound. We also show that one-hidden-layer neural networks don't have universal approximation power over the whole domain. The analysis is based on a key lemma showing that any finite sum of periodic functions is either non-integrable or the zero function, which might be of independent interest.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

A Tight Lower Bound for Uniformly Stable Algorithms

Leveraging algorithmic stability to derive sharp generalization bounds is a classic and powerful approach in learning theory. Since Vapnik and Chervonenkis [1974] first formalized the idea for analyzing SVMs, it has been utilized to study many fundamental learning algorithms (e.g., $k$-nearest neighbors [Rogers and Wagner, 1978], stochastic gradient method [Hardt et al., 2016], linear regression [Maurer, 2017], etc). In a recent line of great works by Feldman and Vondrak [2018, 2019] as well as Bousquet et al. [2020b], they prove a high probability generalization upper bound of order $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(γ+\frac{L}{\sqrt{n}})$ for any uniformly $γ$-stable algorithm and $L$-bounded loss function. Although much progress was achieved in proving generalization upper bounds for stable algorithms, our knowledge of lower bounds is rather limited. In fact, there is no nontrivial lower bound known ever since the study of uniform stability [Bousquet and Elisseeff, 2002], to the best of our knowledge. In this paper we fill the gap by proving a tight generalization lower bound of order $Ω(γ+\frac{L}{\sqrt{n}})$, which matches the best known upper bound up to logarithmic factors

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

A Note on John Simplex with Positive Dilation

We prove a Johns theorem for simplices in $R^d$ with positive dilation factor $d+2$, which improves the previously known $d^2$ upper bound. This bound is tight in view of the $d$ lower bound. Furthermore, we give an example that $d$ isn't the optimal lower bound when $d=2$. Our results answered both questions regarding Johns theorem for simplices with positive dilation raised by \cite{leme2020costly}.

math.MG↗

arXiv2020

Boosting for Control of Dynamical Systems

We study the question of how to aggregate controllers for dynamical systems in order to improve their performance. To this end, we propose a framework of boosting for online control. Our main result is an efficient boosting algorithm that combines weak controllers into a provably more accurate one. Empirical evaluation on a host of control settings supports our theoretical findings.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

The Expressive Power of Neural Networks: A View from the Width

The expressive power of neural networks is important for understanding deep learning. Most existing works consider this problem from the view of the depth of a network. In this paper, we study how width affects the expressiveness of neural networks. Classical results state that depth-bounded (e.g. depth-$2$) networks with suitable activation functions are universal approximators. We show a universal approximation theorem for width-bounded ReLU networks: width-$(n+4)$ ReLU networks, where $n$ is the input dimension, are universal approximators. Moreover, except for a measure zero set, all functions cannot be approximated by width-$n$ ReLU networks, which exhibits a phase transition. Several recent works demonstrate the benefits of depth by proving the depth-efficiency of neural networks. That is, there are classes of deep networks which cannot be realized by any shallow network whose size is no more than an exponential bound. Here we pose the dual question on the width-efficiency of ReLU networks: Are there wide networks that cannot be realized by narrow networks whose size is not substantially larger? We show that there exist classes of wide networks which cannot be realized by any narrow network whose depth is no more than a polynomial bound. On the other hand, we demonstrate by extensive experiments that narrow networks whose size exceed the polynomial bound by a constant factor can approximate wide and shallow network with high accuracy. Our results provide more comprehensive evidence that depth is more effective than width for the expressiveness of ReLU networks.

cs.LG↗