In the field of machine learning there is a growing interest towards more robust and generalizable algorithms. This is for example important to bridge the gap between the environment in which the training data was collected and the environment where the algorithm is deployed. Machine learning algorithms have increasingly been shown to excel in finding patterns and correlations from data. Determining the consistency of these patterns and for example the distinction between causal correlations and nonsensical spurious relations has proven to be much more difficult. In this paper a regularization scheme is introduced that prefers universal causal correlations. This approach is based on 1) the robustness of causal correlations and 2) the data not being independently and identically distribute (i.i.d.). The scheme is demonstrated with a classification task by clustering the (non-i.i.d.) training set in subpopulations. A non-i.i.d. regularization term is then introduced that penalizes weights that are not invariant over these clusters. The resulting algorithm favours correlations that are universal over the subpopulations and indeed a better performance is obtained on an out-of-distribution test set with respect to a more conventional l_2-regularization.
Robustness of deep neural networks (DNNs) to malicious perturbations is a hot topic in trustworthy AI. Existing techniques obtain robust models given fixed datasets, either by modifying model structures, or by optimizing the process of inference or training. While significant improvements have been made, the possibility of constructing a high-quality dataset for model robustness remain unexplored. Follow the campaign of data-centric AI launched by Andrew Ng, we propose a novel algorithm for dataset enhancement that works well for many existing DNN models to improve robustness. Transferable adv…
Model attributions are important in deep neural networks as they aid practitioners in understanding the models, but recent studies reveal that attributions can be easily perturbed by adding imperceptible noise to the input. The non-differentiable Kendall's rank correlation is a key performance index for attribution protection. In this paper, we first show that the expected Kendall's rank correlation is positively correlated to cosine similarity and then indicate that the direction of attribution is the key to attribution robustness. Based on these findings, we explore the vector space of attri…
Exploiting Edge Features for Transferable Adversarial Attacks in Distributed Machine Learning
Department of Excellence in Robotics and AI, TeCIP, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna（机器人与人工智能卓越部门，TeCIP，圣安娜高等学院）；Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari（电气与电子工程系，卡利亚里大学）
Isik University（伊斯克大学）；Simula Research Laboratory（西穆拉研究实验室）
Deep neural network architectures are considered to be robust to random perturbations. Nevertheless, it was shown that they could be severely vulnerable to slight but carefully crafted perturbations of the input, termed as adversarial samples. In recent years, numerous studies have been conducted in this new area called "Adversarial Machine Learning" to devise new adversarial attacks and to defend against these attacks with more robust DNN architectures. However, almost all the research work so far has been concentrated on utilising model loss function to craft adversarial examples or create r…
Vector Institute（向量研究所）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；University of Bremen（不来梅大学）；Google Brain（谷歌大脑）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Adversarial examples are malicious inputs crafted to cause a model to misclassify them. Their most common instantiation, "perturbation-based" adversarial examples introduce changes to the input that leave its true label unchanged, yet result in a different model prediction. Conversely, "invariance-based" adversarial examples insert changes to the input that leave the model's prediction unaffected despite the underlying input's label having changed. In this paper, we demonstrate that robustness to perturbation-based adversarial examples is not only insufficient for general robustness, but worse…
It has been widely recognized that adversarial examples can be easily crafted to fool deep networks, which mainly root from the locally non-linear behavior nearby input examples. Applying mixup in training provides an effective mechanism to improve generalization performance and model robustness against adversarial perturbations, which introduces the globally linear behavior in-between training examples. However, in previous work, the mixup-trained models only passively defend adversarial attacks in inference by directly classifying the inputs, where the induced global linearity is not well ex…
Vector Institute（向量学院）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Ryerson University（瑞尔森大学）
Reinforcement learning (RL) methods usually treat reward functions as black boxes. As such, these methods must extensively interact with the environment in order to discover rewards and optimal policies. In most RL applications, however, users have to program the reward function and, hence, there is the opportunity to make the reward function visible -- to show the reward function's code to the RL agent so it can exploit the function's internal structure to learn optimal policies in a more sample efficient manner. In this paper, we show how to accomplish this idea in two steps. First, we propo…
American Family Mutual Insurance Company（美国家庭互助保险公司）；University of Delaware（特拉华大学）
This paper proposes a CS scheme that exploits the representational power of restricted Boltzmann machines and deep learning architectures to model the prior distribution of the sparsity pattern of signals belonging to the same class. The determined probability distribution is then used in a maximum a posteriori (MAP) approach for the reconstruction. The parameters of the prior distribution are learned from training data. The motivation behind this approach is to model the higher-order statistical dependencies between the coefficients of the sparse representation, with the final goal of improvi…
Federal University of Uberlândia（乌贝兰迪亚联邦大学）；University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）；Federal University of São João del Rei（圣若昂德尔雷伊联邦大学）
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the approaches that has been proposed to analyze the collected data (e.g., vibration signals) providing a diagnosis of the asset's operating condition. It is known that models trained with labeled data (supervised) achieve excellent results, but two main problems make their application in production processes difficult: (i) impossibility or long time to obtain a sample of all operational conditions (since faults seldom happen) and (ii) high cost of experts to label all acquired data. Another limitating factor for the applicability of AI approaches in this…
The sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model for neural machine translation has significantly improved the accuracy of language translation. There have been new efforts to use this seq2seq model for program language translation or program comparisons. In this work, we present the detailed steps of using a seq2seq model to translate CUDA programs to OpenCL programs, which both have very similar programming styles. Our work shows (i) a training input set generation method, (ii) pre/post processing, and (iii) a case study using Polybench-gpu-1.0, NVIDIA SDK, and Rodinia benchmarks.
Today, it is more important than ever before for users to have trust in the models they use. As Machine Learning models fall under increased regulatory scrutiny and begin to see more applications in high-stakes situations, it becomes critical to explain our models. Piecewise Linear Neural Networks (PLNN) with the ReLU activation function have quickly become extremely popular models due to many appealing properties; however, they still present many challenges in the areas of robustness and interpretation. To this end, we introduce novel methodology toward simplification and increased interpreta…
Freie Universität Berlin（柏林自由大学）；Porsche Digital GmbH（保时捷数字有限公司）；Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute（弗劳恩霍夫海因里希·赫兹研究所）；Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie（柏林亥姆霍兹材料与能源中心）
Variational quantum machine learning is an extensively studied application of near-term quantum computers. The success of variational quantum learning models crucially depends on finding a suitable parametrization of the model that encodes an inductive bias relevant to the learning task. However, precious little is known about guiding principles for the construction of suitable parametrizations. In this work, we holistically explore when and how symmetries of the learning problem can be exploited to construct quantum learning models with outcomes invariant under the symmetry of the learning ta…
Robustness is becoming another important challenge of federated learning in that the data collection process in each client is naturally accompanied by noisy labels. However, it is far more complex and challenging owing to varying levels of data heterogeneity and noise over clients, which exacerbates the client-to-client performance discrepancy. In this work, we propose a robust federated learning method called FedRN, which exploits k-reliable neighbors with high data expertise or similarity. Our method helps mitigate the gap between low- and high-performance clients by training only with a se…
The outcome of a collective decision-making process, such as crowdsourcing, often relies on the procedure through which the perspectives of its individual members are aggregated. Popular aggregation methods, such as the majority rule, often fail to produce the optimal result, especially in high-complexity tasks. Methods that rely on meta-cognitive information, such as confidence-based methods and the Surprisingly Popular Option, had shown an improvement in various tasks. However, there is still a significant number of cases with no optimal solution. Our aim is to exploit meta-cognitive informa…
Neural approaches have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy on machine translation but suffer from the high cost of collecting large scale parallel data. Thus, a lot of research has been conducted for neural machine translation (NMT) with very limited parallel data, i.e., the low-resource setting. In this paper, we provide a survey for low-resource NMT and classify related works into three categories according to the auxiliary data they used: (1) exploiting monolingual data of source and/or target languages, (2) exploiting data from auxiliary languages, and (3) exploiting multi-modal data. We ho…
State-of-the-art machine learning frameworks support a wide variety of design features to enable a flexible machine learning programming interface and to ease the programmability burden on machine learning developers. Identifying and using a performance-optimal setting in feature-rich frameworks, however, involves a non-trivial amount of performance profiling efforts and often relies on domain-specific knowledge. This paper takes a deep dive into analyzing the performance impact of key design features in a machine learning framework and quantifies the role of parallelism. The observations and …
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Córdoba（科尔多瓦大学）
Data augmentation is rapidly gaining attention in machine learning. Synthetic data can be generated by simple transformations or through the data distribution. In the latter case, the main challenge is to estimate the label associated to new synthetic patterns. This paper studies the effect of generating synthetic data by convex combination of patterns and the use of these as unsupervised information in a semi-supervised learning framework with support vector machines, avoiding thus the need to label synthetic examples. We perform experiments on a total of 53 binary classification datasets. Ou…
Accurate virtual high-throughput screening (VHTS) of transition metal complexes (TMCs) remains challenging due to the possibility of high multi-reference (MR) character that complicates property evaluation. We compute MR diagnostics for over 5,000 ligands present in previously synthesized transition metal complexes in the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD). To accomplish this task, we introduce an iterative approach for consistent ligand charge assignment for ligands in the CSD. Across this set, we observe that MR character correlates linearly with the inverse value of the averaged bond order…
By reducing optimization to a sequence of smaller subproblems, working set algorithms achieve fast convergence times for many machine learning problems. Despite such performance, working set implementations often resort to heuristics to determine subproblem size, makeup, and stopping criteria. We propose BlitzWS, a working set algorithm with useful theoretical guarantees. Our theory relates subproblem size and stopping criteria to the amount of progress during each iteration. This result motivates strategies for optimizing algorithmic parameters and discarding irrelevant components as BlitzWS …
Class labels used for machine learning are relatable to each other, with certain class labels being more similar to each other than others (e.g. images of cats and dogs are more similar to each other than those of cats and cars). Such similarity among classes is often the cause of poor model performance due to the models confusing between them. Current labeling techniques fail to explicitly capture such similarity information. In this paper, we instead exploit the similarity between classes by capturing the similarity information with our novel confidence labels. Confidence labels are probabil…
Aspect sentiment classification (ASC) aims at determining sentiments expressed towards different aspects in a sentence. While state-of-the-art ASC models have achieved remarkable performance, they are recently shown to suffer from the issue of robustness. Particularly in two common scenarios: when domains of test and training data are different (out-of-domain scenario) or test data is adversarially perturbed (adversarial scenario), ASC models may attend to irrelevant words and neglect opinion expressions that truly describe diverse aspects. To tackle the challenge, in this paper, we hypothesiz…
The amount of data available in the world is growing faster than our ability to deal with it. However, if we take advantage of the internal \emph{structure}, data may become much smaller for machine learning purposes. In this paper we focus on one of the fundamental machine learning tasks, empirical risk minimization (ERM), and provide faster algorithms with the help from the clustering structure of the data. We introduce a simple notion of raw clustering that can be efficiently computed from the data, and propose two algorithms based on clustering information. Our accelerated algorithm Cluste…
Distribution mismatches between the data seen at training and at application time remain a major challenge in all application areas of machine learning. We study this problem in the context of machine listening (Task 1b of the DCASE 2019 Challenge). We propose a novel approach to learn domain-invariant classifiers in an end-to-end fashion by enforcing equal hidden layer representations for domain-parallel samples, i.e. time-aligned recordings from different recording devices. No classification labels are needed for our domain adaptation (DA) method, which makes the data collection process chea…
University of California, Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）；University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）
Several works in computer vision have demonstrated the effectiveness of active learning for adapting the recognition model when new unlabeled data becomes available. Most of these works consider that labels obtained from the annotator are correct. However, in a practical scenario, as the quality of the labels depends on the annotator, some of the labels might be wrong, which results in degraded recognition performance. In this paper, we address the problems of i) how a system can identify which of the queried labels are wrong and ii) how a multi-class active learning system can be adapted to m…
Comment on "robustness and regularization of support vector machines" by H. Xu, et al., (Journal of Machine Learning Research, vol. 10, pp. 1485-1510, 2009, arXiv:0803.3490)
Ferdowsi University of Mashhad（马什哈德菲尔多西大学）；Islamic Azad University, Mashhad Branch（伊斯兰阿扎德大学马什哈德分校）
We study a federated variant of the best-arm identification problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits: a set of clients, each of whom can sample only a subset of the arms, collaborate via a server to identify the best arm (i.e., the arm with the highest mean reward) with prescribed confidence. For this problem, we propose Fed-SEL, a simple communication-efficient algorithm that builds on successive elimination techniques and involves local sampling steps at the clients. To study the performance of Fed-SEL, we introduce a notion of arm-heterogeneity that captures the level of dissimilarity betw…
Institute for AI & Fundamental Interactions（人工智能与基础交互研究所）；Theiss Research
We present an improved method for symbolic regression that seeks to fit data to formulas that are Pareto-optimal, in the sense of having the best accuracy for a given complexity. It improves on the previous state-of-the-art by typically being orders of magnitude more robust toward noise and bad data, and also by discovering many formulas that stumped previous methods. We develop a method for discovering generalized symmetries (arbitrary modularity in the computational graph of a formula) from gradient properties of a neural network fit. We use normalizing flows to generalize our symbolic regre…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）
Learning graphs from data automatically has shown encouraging performance on clustering and semisupervised learning tasks. However, real data are often corrupted, which may cause the learned graph to be inexact or unreliable. In this paper, we propose a novel robust graph learning scheme to learn reliable graphs from real-world noisy data by adaptively removing noise and errors in the raw data. We show that our proposed model can also be viewed as a robust version of manifold regularized robust PCA, where the quality of the graph plays a critical role. The proposed model is able to boost the p…
We propose an algorithm for a family of optimization problems where the objective can be decomposed as a sum of functions with monotonicity properties. The motivating problem is optimization of hyperparameters of machine learning algorithms, where we argue that the objective, validation error, can be decomposed as monotonic functions of the hyperparameters. Our proposed algorithm adapts Bayesian optimization methods to incorporate the monotonicity constraints. We illustrate the advantages of exploiting monotonicity using illustrative examples and demonstrate the improvements in optimization ef…
IMEC（比利时微电子研究中心）；Exascience Life Lab（Exascience生命实验室）
To deal with the complexity of the new bigger and more complex generation of data, machine learning (ML) techniques are probably the first and foremost used. For ML algorithms to produce results in a reasonable amount of time, they need to be implemented efficiently. In this paper, we analyze one of the means to increase the performances of machine learning algorithms which is exploiting data locality. Data locality and access patterns are often at the heart of performance issues in computing systems due to the use of certain hardware techniques to improve performance. Altering the access patt…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）
Despite the success of multilingual sequence-to-sequence pretraining, most existing approaches rely on monolingual corpora, and do not make use of the strong cross-lingual signal contained in parallel data. In this paper, we present PARADISE (PARAllel & Denoising Integration in SEquence-to-sequence models), which extends the conventional denoising objective used to train these models by (i) replacing words in the noised sequence according to a multilingual dictionary, and (ii) predicting the reference translation according to a parallel corpus instead of recovering the original sequence. Our e…
In this discussion paper, we survey recent research surrounding robustness of machine learning models. As learning algorithms become increasingly more popular in data-driven control systems, their robustness to data uncertainty must be ensured in order to maintain reliable safety-critical operations. We begin by reviewing common formalisms for such robustness, and then move on to discuss popular and state-of-the-art techniques for training robust machine learning models as well as methods for provably certifying such robustness. From this unification of robust machine learning, we identify and…
Sichuan University（四川大学）；Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）；Zhejiang University City College（浙江大学城市学院）
Support vector machines (SVMs) are successful modeling and prediction tools with a variety of applications. Previous work has demonstrated the superiority of the SVMs in dealing with the high dimensional, low sample size problems. However, the numerical difficulties of the SVMs will become severe with the increase of the sample size. Although there exist many solvers for the SVMs, only few of them are designed by exploiting the special structures of the SVMs. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient sparse semismooth Newton based augmented Lagrangian method for solving a large-scale convex…
