Recent studies show that even highly biased dense networks contain an unbiased substructure that can achieve better out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization than the original model. Existing works usually search the invariant subnetwork using modular risk minimization (MRM) with out-domain data. Such a paradigm may bring about two potential weaknesses: 1) Unfairness, due to the insufficient observation of out-domain data during training; and 2) Sub-optimal OOD generalization, due to the feature-untargeted model pruning on the whole data distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel Spurious Feature-targeted model Pruning framework, dubbed SFP, to automatically explore invariant substructures without referring to the above weaknesses. Specifically, SFP identifies in-distribution (ID) features during training using our theoretically verified task loss, upon which, SFP can perform ID targeted-model pruning that removes branches with strong dependencies on ID features. Notably, by attenuating the projections of spurious features into model space, SFP can push the model learning toward invariant features and pull that out of environmental features, devising optimal OOD generalization. Moreover, we also conduct detailed theoretical analysis to provide the rationality guarantee and a proof framework for OOD structures via model sparsity, and for the first time, reveal how a highly biased data distribution affects the model's OOD generalization. Extensive experiments on various OOD datasets show that SFP can significantly outperform both structure-based and non-structure OOD generalization SOTAs, with accuracy improvement up to 4.72% and 23.35%, respectively.
On the Limitations of Language Targeted Pruning: Investigating the Calibration Language Impact in Multilingual LLM Pruning
Department of Computer Science, TU Dortmund University（图恩-多特蒙德大学计算机科学系）；Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology, University of Bonn（波恩-亚琛国际信息科技中心，波恩大学）；Computer Science School, University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学计算机科学学院）；Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence（拉马尔人工智能与机器学习研究所）
Neural networks are easier to optimise when they have many more weights than are required for modelling the mapping from inputs to outputs. This suggests a two-stage learning procedure that first learns a large net and then prunes away connections or hidden units. But standard training does not necessarily encourage nets to be amenable to pruning. We introduce targeted dropout, a method for training a neural network so that it is robust to subsequent pruning. Before computing the gradients for each weight update, targeted dropout stochastically selects a set of units or weights to be dropped u…
Malicious attackers can generate targeted adversarial examples by imposing tiny noises, forcing neural networks to produce specific incorrect outputs. With cross-model transferability, network models remain vulnerable even in black-box settings. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness of ensemble-based methods in generating transferable adversarial examples. To further enhance transferability, model augmentation methods aim to produce more networks participating in the ensemble. However, existing model augmentation methods are only proven effective in untargeted attacks. In this work, we p…
RaPA: Enhancing Transferable Targeted Attacks via Random Parameter Pruning
State Key Lab of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所人工智能安全国家重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Attribution-Guided Pruning for Insight and Control: Circuit Discovery and Targeted Correction in Small-scale LLMs
Data Science Center ScaDS.AI, Universität Leipzig（ScaDS.AI数据科学中心，莱比锡大学）；Department of Artificial Intelligence, Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institute（人工智能系，弗劳恩霍夫 Heinrich-Hertz 研究所）；Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Technische Universität Berlin（电气工程与计算机科学系，柏林技术大学）；BIFOLD - Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data（柏林学习与数据基础研究所）；Centre of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence, Technological University Dublin（可解释人工智能中心，都柏林技术大学）
Rethinking Impersonation and Dodging Attacks on Face Recognition Systems
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Shanghai Shizhuang Information Technology Co., Ltd（上海石庄信息技术有限公司）；La Trobe University（拉筹伯大学）
When large scale training data is available, one can obtain compact and accurate networks to be deployed in resource-constrained environments effectively through quantization and pruning. However, training data are often protected due to privacy concerns and it is challenging to obtain compact networks without data. We study data-free quantization and pruning by transferring knowledge from trained large networks to compact networks. Auxiliary generators are simultaneously and adversarially trained with the targeted compact networks to generate synthetic inputs that maximize the discrepancy bet…
How to Achieve Prototypical Birth and Death for OOD Detection?
School of Computer and Electronic Information, Nanjing Normal University（南京师范大学计算机与电子信息学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Information Technology, Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine（南京中医药大学人工智能与信息技术学院）；School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen（中山大学深圳校区网络安全科学与技术学院）；Tohoku University（东北大学）
George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）；University of Maryland, Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩郡分校）；Microsoft（微软）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) achieved great cognitive performance at the expense of considerable computation load. To relieve the computation load, many optimization works are developed to reduce the model redundancy by identifying and removing insignificant model components, such as weight sparsity and filter pruning. However, these works only evaluate model components' static significance with internal parameter information, ignoring their dynamic interaction with external inputs. With per-input feature activation, the model component significance can dynamically change, and thus the…
