Theoretically, domain adaptation is a well-researched problem. Further, this theory has been well-used in practice. In particular, we note the bound on target error given by Ben-David et al. (2010) and the well-known domain-aligning algorithm based on this work using Domain Adversarial Neural Networks (DANN) presented by Ganin and Lempitsky (2015). Recently, multiple variants of DANN have been proposed for the related problem of domain generalization, but without much discussion of the original motivating bound. In this paper, we investigate the validity of DANN in domain generalization from this perspective. We investigate conditions under which application of DANN makes sense and further consider DANN as a dynamic process during training. Our investigation suggests that the application of DANN to domain generalization may not be as straightforward as it seems. To address this, we design an algorithmic extension to DANN in the domain generalization case. Our experimentation validates both theory and algorithm.
National Innovation Institute of Defense Technology（国防科技创新研究院）
Data augmentation has been widely used to improve generalization in training deep neural networks. Recent works show that using worst-case transformations or adversarial augmentation strategies can significantly improve the accuracy and robustness. However, due to the non-differentiable properties of image transformations, searching algorithms such as reinforcement learning or evolution strategy have to be applied, which are not computationally practical for large scale problems. In this work, we show that by simply applying consistency training with random data augmentation, state-of-the-art …
Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）；University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）
Domain adaptation (DA) and domain generalization (DG) have emerged as a solution to the domain shift problem where the distribution of the source and target data is different. The task of DG is more challenging than DA as the target data is totally unseen during the training phase in DG scenarios. The current state-of-the-art employs adversarial techniques, however, these are rarely considered for the DG problem. Furthermore, these approaches do not consider correlation alignment which has been proven highly beneficial for minimizing domain discrepancy. In this paper, we propose a correlation-…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）
By injecting adversarial examples into training data, adversarial training is promising for improving the robustness of deep learning models. However, most existing adversarial training approaches are based on a specific type of adversarial attack. It may not provide sufficiently representative samples from the adversarial domain, leading to a weak generalization ability on adversarial examples from other attacks. Moreover, during the adversarial training, adversarial perturbations on inputs are usually crafted by fast single-step adversaries so as to scale to large datasets. This work is main…
Meta-learning provides a promising way for learning to efficiently learn and achieves great success in many applications. However, most meta-learning literature focuses on dealing with tasks from a same domain, making it brittle to generalize to tasks from the other unseen domains. In this work, we address this problem by simulating tasks from the other unseen domains to improve the generalization and robustness of meta-learning method. Specifically, we propose a model-agnostic shift layer to learn how to simulate the domain shift and generate pseudo tasks, and develop a new adversarial learni…
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory（劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室）
To be successful in single source domain generalization, maximizing diversity of synthesized domains has emerged as one of the most effective strategies. Many of the recent successes have come from methods that pre-specify the types of diversity that a model is exposed to during training, so that it can ultimately generalize well to new domains. However, naïve diversity based augmentations do not work effectively for domain generalization either because they cannot model large domain shift, or because the span of transforms that are pre-specified do not cover the types of shift commonly occurr…
PAII Inc.（PAII公司）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；Alibaba DAMO Academy（阿里巴巴达摩院）；PingAn Insurance Group（平安保险集团）
Deep learning methods can struggle to handle domain shifts not seen in training data, which can cause them to not generalize well to unseen domains. This has led to research attention on domain generalization (DG), which aims to the model's generalization ability to out-of-distribution. Adversarial domain generalization is a popular approach to DG, but conventional approaches (1) struggle to sufficiently align features so that local neighborhoods are mixed across domains; and (2) can suffer from feature space over collapse which can threaten generalization performance. To address these limitat…
Domain generalization approaches aim to learn a domain invariant prediction model for unknown target domains from multiple training source domains with different distributions. Significant efforts have recently been committed to broad domain generalization, which is a challenging and topical problem in machine learning and computer vision communities. Most previous domain generalization approaches assume that the conditional distribution across the domains remain the same across the source domains and learn a domain invariant model by minimizing the marginal distributions. However, the assumpt…
The generalization capability of machine learning models, which refers to generalizing the knowledge for an "unseen" domain via learning from one or multiple seen domain(s), is of great importance to develop and deploy machine learning applications in the real-world conditions. Domain Generalization (DG) techniques aim to enhance such generalization capability of machine learning models, where the learnt feature representation and the classifier are two crucial factors to improve generalization and make decisions. In this paper, we propose Discriminative Adversarial Domain Generalization (DADG…
Adversarial Examples Detection with Bayesian Neural Network
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；University of California Davis（加利福尼亚大学戴维斯分校）；University of California Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
Adversarial pruning compresses models while preserving robustness. Current methods require access to adversarial examples during pruning. This significantly hampers training efficiency. Moreover, as new adversarial attacks and training methods develop at a rapid rate, adversarial pruning methods need to be modified accordingly to keep up. In this work, we propose a novel framework to prune a previously trained robust neural network while maintaining adversarial robustness, without further generating adversarial examples. We leverage concurrent self-distillation and pruning to preserve knowledg…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Samsung Research America（三星美国研究院）；Microsoft Corporation（微软公司）
We study in this paper the problem of novel human-object interaction (HOI) detection, aiming at improving the generalization ability of the model to unseen scenarios. The challenge mainly stems from the large compositional space of objects and predicates, which leads to the lack of sufficient training data for all the object-predicate combinations. As a result, most existing HOI methods heavily rely on object priors and can hardly generalize to unseen combinations. To tackle this problem, we propose a unified framework of adversarial domain generalization to learn object-invariant features for…
Harvard University（哈佛大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Boston University（波士顿大学）
We investigate the power of censoring techniques, first developed for learning {\em fair representations}, to address domain generalization. We examine {\em adversarial} censoring techniques for learning invariant representations from multiple "studies" (or domains), where each study is drawn according to a distribution on domains. The mapping is used at test time to classify instances from a new domain. In many contexts, such as medical forecasting, domain generalization from studies in populous areas (where data are plentiful), to geographically remote populations (for which no training data…
Learning domain-invariant representation is a dominant approach for domain generalization (DG), where we need to build a classifier that is robust toward domain shifts. However, previous domain-invariance-based methods overlooked the underlying dependency of classes on domains, which is responsible for the trade-off between classification accuracy and domain invariance. Because the primary purpose of DG is to classify unseen domains rather than the invariance itself, the improvement of the invariance can negatively affect DG performance under this trade-off. To overcome the problem, this study…
Automatic speech emotion recognition provides computers with critical context to enable user understanding. While methods trained and tested within the same dataset have been shown successful, they often fail when applied to unseen datasets. To address this, recent work has focused on adversarial methods to find more generalized representations of emotional speech. However, many of these methods have issues converging, and only involve datasets collected in laboratory conditions. In this paper, we introduce Adversarial Discriminative Domain Generalization (ADDoG), which follows an easier to tr…
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved beyond human-level accuracy in the image classification task and are widely deployed in real-world environments. However, CNNs show vulnerability to adversarial perturbations that are well-designed noises aiming to mislead the classification models. In order to defend against the adversarial perturbations, adversarially trained GAN (ATGAN) is proposed to improve the adversarial robustness generalization of the state-of-the-art CNNs trained by adversarial training. ATGAN incorporates adversarial training into standard GAN training procedure to …
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Tencent（腾讯）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Adversarial training (AT) has been demonstrated as one of the most promising defense methods against various adversarial attacks. To our knowledge, existing AT-based methods usually train with the locally most adversarial perturbed points and treat all the perturbed points equally, which may lead to considerably weaker adversarial robust generalization on test data. In this work, we introduce a new adversarial training framework that considers the diversity as well as characteristics of the perturbed points in the vicinity of benign samples. To realize the framework, we propose a Regional Adve…
Neural networks are being applied in many tasks related to IoT with encouraging results. For example, neural networks can precisely detect human, objects and animal via surveillance camera for security purpose. However, neural networks have been recently found vulnerable to well-designed input samples that called adversarial examples. Such issue causes neural networks to misclassify adversarial examples that are imperceptible to humans. We found giving a rotation to an adversarial example image can defeat the effect of adversarial examples. Using MNIST number images as the original images, we …
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；University of Delaware（特拉华大学）
Adversarial data augmentation has shown promise for training robust deep neural networks against unforeseen data shifts or corruptions. However, it is difficult to define heuristics to generate effective fictitious target distributions containing "hard" adversarial perturbations that are largely different from the source distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective regularization term for adversarial data augmentation. We theoretically derive it from the information bottleneck principle, which results in a maximum-entropy formulation. Intuitively, this regularization term enco…
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）
Obtaining deep networks that are robust against adversarial examples and generalize well is an open problem. A recent hypothesis even states that both robust and accurate models are impossible, i.e., adversarial robustness and generalization are conflicting goals. In an effort to clarify the relationship between robustness and generalization, we assume an underlying, low-dimensional data manifold and show that: 1. regular adversarial examples leave the manifold; 2. adversarial examples constrained to the manifold, i.e., on-manifold adversarial examples, exist; 3. on-manifold adversarial exampl…
Institute of Information Science（信息科学研究所）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）
Recent studies have shown that deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, but most of the methods proposed to defense adversarial examples cannot solve this problem fundamentally. In this paper, we theoretically prove that there is an upper bound for neural networks with identity mappings to constrain the error caused by adversarial noises. However, in actual computations, this kind of neural network no longer holds any upper bound and is therefore susceptible to adversarial examples. Following similar procedures, we explain why adversarial examples can fool other deep neural…
Improving Generalization of Adversarial Training via Robust Critical Fine-Tuning
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Automation, CAS（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
Recent improvements in deep learning models and their practical applications have raised concerns about the robustness of these models against adversarial examples. Adversarial training (AT) has been shown effective to reach a robust model against the attack that is used during training. However, it usually fails against other attacks, i.e. the model overfits to the training attack scheme. In this paper, we propose a simple modification to the AT that mitigates the mentioned issue. More specifically, we minimize the perturbation $\ell_p$ norm while maximizing the classification loss in the Lag…
Deep neural networks are easily attacked by imperceptible perturbation. Presently, adversarial training (AT) is the most effective method to enhance the robustness of the model against adversarial examples. However, because adversarial training solved a min-max value problem, in comparison with natural training, the robustness and generalization are contradictory, i.e., the robustness improvement of the model will decrease the generalization of the model. To address this issue, in this paper, a new concept, namely confidence threshold (CT), is introduced and the reducing of the confidence thre…
SenseTime（商汤科技）；Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）；Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心）；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Adversarial training has been demonstrated to be one of the most effective remedies for defending adversarial examples, yet it often suffers from the huge robustness generalization gap on unseen testing adversaries, deemed as the adversarially robust generalization problem. Despite the preliminary understandings devoted to adversarially robust generalization, little is known from the architectural perspective. To bridge the gap, this paper for the first time systematically investigated the relationship between adversarially robust generalization and architectural design. Inparticular, we compr…
Adversarial examples are inevitable on the road of pervasive applications of deep neural networks (DNN). Imperceptible perturbations applied on natural samples can lead DNN-based classifiers to output wrong prediction with fair confidence score. It is increasingly important to obtain models with high robustness that are resistant to adversarial examples. In this paper, we survey recent advances in how to understand such intriguing property, i.e. adversarial robustness, from different perspectives. We give preliminary definitions on what adversarial attacks and robustness are. After that, we st…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；PCL Research Center of Networks and Communications, Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室网络通信PCL研究中心）；Key Lab. of Machine Perception (MoE), School of EECS, Peking University（北京大学信息科学技术学院机器感知教育部重点实验室）
The study on improving the robustness of deep neural networks against adversarial examples grows rapidly in recent years. Among them, adversarial training is the most promising one, which flattens the input loss landscape (loss change with respect to input) via training on adversarially perturbed examples. However, how the widely used weight loss landscape (loss change with respect to weight) performs in adversarial training is rarely explored. In this paper, we investigate the weight loss landscape from a new perspective, and identify a clear correlation between the flatness of weight loss la…
MEAT: Median-Ensemble Adversarial Training for Improving Robustness and Generalization
Fujian Province Key Laboratory of Information Security（福建省信息安全重点实验室）；College of Computer Science and Big Data, Fuzhou University（福州大学计算机与大数据学院）；Yuan Ze University（元智大学）
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Saarland Informatics Campus（萨尔兰信息学园区）；University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）
Adversarial training (AT) has become the de-facto standard to obtain models robust against adversarial examples. However, AT exhibits severe robust overfitting: cross-entropy loss on adversarial examples, so-called robust loss, decreases continuously on training examples, while eventually increasing on test examples. In practice, this leads to poor robust generalization, i.e., adversarial robustness does not generalize well to new examples. In this paper, we study the relationship between robust generalization and flatness of the robust loss landscape in weight space, i.e., whether robust loss…
Adversarial training is an approach for increasing model's resilience against adversarial perturbations. Such approaches have been demonstrated to result in models with feature representations that generalize better. However, limited works have been done on adversarial training of models on graph data. In this paper, we raise such a question { does adversarial training improve the generalization of graph representations. We formulate L2 and L1 versions of adversarial training in two powerful node embedding methods: graph autoencoder (GAE) and variational graph autoencoder (VGAE). We conduct ex…
Black-box adversarial attacks designing adversarial examples for unseen neural networks (NNs) have received great attention over the past years. While several successful black-box attack schemes have been proposed in the literature, the underlying factors driving the transferability of black-box adversarial examples still lack a thorough understanding. In this paper, we aim to demonstrate the role of the generalization properties of the substitute classifier used for generating adversarial examples in the transferability of the attack scheme to unobserved NN classifiers. To do this, we apply t…
The generalization gap in reinforcement learning (RL) has been a significant obstacle that prevents the RL agent from learning general skills and adapting to varying environments. Increasing the generalization capacity of the RL systems can significantly improve their performance on real-world working environments. In this work, we propose a novel policy-aware adversarial data augmentation method to augment the standard policy learning method with automatically generated trajectory data. Different from the commonly used observation transformation based data augmentations, our proposed method a…
Jilin University（吉林大学）；Rice University（莱斯大学）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Despite the recent advances of graph neural networks (GNNs) in modeling graph data, the training of GNNs on large datasets is notoriously hard due to the overfitting. Adversarial training, which augments data with the worst-case adversarial examples, has been widely demonstrated to improve model's robustness against adversarial attacks and generalization ability. However, while the previous adversarial training generally focuses on protecting GNNs from spiteful attacks, it remains unclear how the adversarial training could improve the generalization abilities of GNNs in the graph analytics pro…
Adversarial training is a method for enhancing neural networks to improve the robustness against adversarial examples. Besides the security concerns of potential adversarial examples, adversarial training can also improve the generalization ability of neural networks, train robust neural networks, and provide interpretability for neural networks. In this work, we introduce adversarial training in time series analysis to enhance the neural networks for better generalization ability by taking the finance field as an example. Rethinking existing research on adversarial training, we propose the ad…
Deep networks are well-known to be fragile to adversarial attacks, and adversarial training is one of the most popular methods used to train a robust model. To take advantage of unlabeled data, recent works have applied adversarial training to contrastive learning (Adversarial Contrastive Learning; ACL for short) and obtain promising robust performance. However, the theory of ACL is not well understood. To fill this gap, we leverage the Rademacher complexity to analyze the generalization performance of ACL, with a particular focus on linear models and multi-layer neural networks under $\ell_p$…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院数学与系统科学研究院）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
Recently, learning a model that generalizes well on out-of-distribution (OOD) data has attracted great attention in the machine learning community. In this paper, after defining OOD generalization via Wasserstein distance, we theoretically show that a model robust to input perturbation generalizes well on OOD data. Inspired by previous findings that adversarial training helps improve input-robustness, we theoretically show that adversarially trained models have converged excess risk on OOD data, and empirically verify it on both image classification and natural language understanding tasks. Be…
University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司）；Peking University（北京大学）
With the tremendous advances in the architecture and scale of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) over the past few decades, they can easily reach or even exceed the performance of humans in certain tasks. However, a recently discovered shortcoming of CNNs is that they are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Although the adversarial robustness of CNNs can be improved by adversarial training, there is a trade-off between standard accuracy and adversarial robustness. From the neural architecture perspective, this paper aims to improve the adversarial robustness of the backbone CNNs that have a s…
Modern machine learning and deep learning models are shown to be vulnerable when testing data are slightly perturbed. Existing theoretical studies of adversarial training algorithms mostly focus on either adversarial training losses or local convergence properties. In contrast, this paper studies the generalization performance of a generic adversarial training algorithm. Specifically, we consider linear regression models and two-layer neural networks (with lazy training) using squared loss under low-dimensional and high-dimensional regimes. In the former regime, after overcoming the non-smooth…
Recently, Neural networks have seen a huge surge in its adoption due to their ability to provide high accuracy on various tasks. On the other hand, the existence of adversarial examples have raised suspicions regarding the generalization capabilities of neural networks. In this work, we focus on the weight matrix learnt by the neural networks and hypothesize that ill conditioned weight matrix is one of the contributing factors in neural network's susceptibility towards adversarial examples. For ensuring that the learnt weight matrix's condition number remains sufficiently low, we suggest using…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）
Neural network robustness has recently been highlighted by the existence of adversarial examples. Many previous works show that the learned networks do not perform well on perturbed test data, and significantly more labeled data is required to achieve adversarially robust generalization. In this paper, we theoretically and empirically show that with just more unlabeled data, we can learn a model with better adversarially robust generalization. The key insight of our results is based on a risk decomposition theorem, in which the expected robust risk is separated into two parts: the stability pa…
Space Applications Centre（空间应用中心）；Indian Space Research Organization（印度空间研究组织）
Despite numerous attempts sought to provide empirical evidence of adversarial regularization outperforming sole supervision, the theoretical understanding of such phenomena remains elusive. In this study, we aim to resolve whether adversarial regularization indeed performs better than sole supervision at a fundamental level. To bring this insight into fruition, we study vanishing gradient issue, asymptotic iteration complexity, gradient flow and provable convergence in the context of sole supervision and adversarial regularization. The key ingredient is a theoretical justification supported by…
Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院）；Oklahoma State University（俄克拉荷马州立大学）
We propose a novel defensive mechanism based on a generative adversarial network (GAN) framework to defend against adversarial attacks in end-to-end communications systems. Specifically, we utilize a generative network to model a powerful adversary and enable the end-to-end communications system to combat the generative attack network via a minimax game. We show that the proposed system not only works well against white-box and black-box adversarial attacks but also possesses excellent generalization capabilities to maintain good performance under no attacks. We also show that our GAN-based en…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are one of the most popular tools for learning complex high dimensional distributions. However, generalization properties of GANs have not been well understood. In this paper, we analyze the generalization of GANs in practical settings. We show that discriminators trained on discrete datasets with the original GAN loss have poor generalization capability and do not approximate the theoretically optimal discriminator. We propose a zero-centered gradient penalty for improving the generalization of the discriminator by pushing it toward the optimal discrimin…
