Current LLM alignment methods are readily broken through specifically crafted adversarial prompts. While crafting adversarial prompts using discrete optimization is highly effective, such attacks typically use more than 100,000 LLM calls. This high computational cost makes them unsuitable for, e.g., quantitative analyses and adversarial training. To remedy this, we revisit Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) on the continuously relaxed input prompt. Although previous attempts with ordinary gradient-based attacks largely failed, we show that carefully controlling the error introduced by the continuous relaxation tremendously boosts their efficacy. Our PGD for LLMs is up to one order of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art discrete optimization to achieve the same devastating attack results.
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）
We propose a projected Wasserstein gradient descent method (pWGD) for high-dimensional Bayesian inference problems. The underlying density function of a particle system of WGD is approximated by kernel density estimation (KDE), which faces the long-standing curse of dimensionality. We overcome this challenge by exploiting the intrinsic low-rank structure in the difference between the posterior and prior distributions. The parameters are projected into a low-dimensional subspace to alleviate the approximation error of KDE in high dimensions. We formulate a projected Wasserstein gradient flow an…
Evading adversarial example detection defenses requires finding adversarial examples that must simultaneously (a) be misclassified by the model and (b) be detected as non-adversarial. We find that existing attacks that attempt to satisfy multiple simultaneous constraints often over-optimize against one constraint at the cost of satisfying another. We introduce Orthogonal Projected Gradient Descent, an improved attack technique to generate adversarial examples that avoids this problem by orthogonalizing the gradients when running standard gradient-based attacks. We use our technique to evade fo…
Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
A central challenge to many fields of science and engineering involves minimizing non-convex error functions over continuous, high dimensional spaces. Gradient descent or quasi-Newton methods are almost ubiquitously used to perform such minimizations, and it is often thought that a main source of difficulty for these local methods to find the global minimum is the proliferation of local minima with much higher error than the global minimum. Here we argue, based on results from statistical physics, random matrix theory, neural network theory, and empirical evidence, that a deeper and more profo…
Many recent problems in signal processing and machine learning such as compressed sensing, image restoration, matrix/tensor recovery, and non-negative matrix factorization can be cast as constrained optimization. Projected gradient descent is a simple yet efficient method for solving such constrained optimization problems. Local convergence analysis furthers our understanding of its asymptotic behavior near the solution, offering sharper bounds on the convergence rate compared to global convergence analysis. However, local guarantees often appear scattered in problem-specific areas of machine …
We propose a projected semi-stochastic gradient descent method with mini-batch for improving both the theoretical complexity and practical performance of the general stochastic gradient descent method (SGD). We are able to prove linear convergence under weak strong convexity assumption. This requires no strong convexity assumption for minimizing the sum of smooth convex functions subject to a compact polyhedral set, which remains popular across machine learning community. Our PS2GD preserves the low-cost per iteration and high optimization accuracy via stochastic gradient variance-reduced tech…
Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences（奥登计算工程与科学研究所）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
The curse of dimensionality is a longstanding challenge in Bayesian inference in high dimensions. In this work, we propose a projected Stein variational gradient descent (pSVGD) method to overcome this challenge by exploiting the fundamental property of intrinsic low dimensionality of the data informed subspace stemming from ill-posedness of such problems. We adaptively construct the subspace using a gradient information matrix of the log-likelihood, and apply pSVGD to the much lower-dimensional coefficients of the parameter projection. The method is demonstrated to be more accurate and effici…
Provably solving stochastic convex optimization problems with constraints is essential for various problems in science, business, and statistics. Recently proposed XOR-Stochastic Gradient Descent (XOR-SGD) provides a convergence rate guarantee solving the constraints-free version of the problem by leveraging XOR-Sampling. However, the task becomes more difficult when additional equality and inequality constraints are needed to be satisfied. Here we propose XOR-PGD, a novel algorithm based on Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) coupled with the XOR sampler, which is guaranteed to solve the constra…
Optimization problems with rank constraints arise in many applications, including matrix regression, structured PCA, matrix completion and matrix decomposition problems. An attractive heuristic for solving such problems is to factorize the low-rank matrix, and to run projected gradient descent on the nonconvex factorized optimization problem. The goal of this problem is to provide a general theoretical framework for understanding when such methods work well, and to characterize the nature of the resulting fixed point. We provide a simple set of conditions under which projected gradient descent…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs（三菱电机研究实验室）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Several convex formulation methods have been proposed previously for statistical estimation with structured sparsity as the prior. These methods often require a carefully tuned regularization parameter, often a cumbersome or heuristic exercise. Furthermore, the estimate that these methods produce might not belong to the desired sparsity model, albeit accurately approximating the true parameter. Therefore, greedy-type algorithms could often be more desirable in estimating structured-sparse parameters. So far, these greedy methods have mostly focused on linear statistical models. In this paper w…
This paper considers reconstructing a spectrally sparse signal from a small number of randomly observed time-domain samples. The signal of interest is a linear combination of complex sinusoids at $R$ distinct frequencies. The frequencies can assume any continuous values in the normalized frequency domain $[0,1)$. After converting the spectrally sparse signal recovery into a low rank structured matrix completion problem, we propose an efficient feasible point approach, named projected Wirtinger gradient descent (PWGD) algorithm, to efficiently solve this structured matrix completion problem. We…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Tencent（腾讯）
In this paper, we propose projected gradient descent (PGD) algorithms for signal estimation from noisy nonlinear measurements. We assume that the unknown $p$-dimensional signal lies near the range of an $L$-Lipschitz continuous generative model with bounded $k$-dimensional inputs. In particular, we consider two cases when the nonlinear link function is either unknown or known. For unknown nonlinearity, similarly to \cite{liu2020generalized}, we make the assumption of sub-Gaussian observations and propose a linear least-squares estimator. We show that when there is no representation error and t…
Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）；Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）
The projected gradient descent (PGD) method has shown to be effective in recovering compressed signals described in a data-driven way by a generative model, i.e., a generator which has learned the data distribution. Further reconstruction improvements for such inverse problems can be achieved by conditioning the generator on the measurement. The boundary equilibrium generative adversarial network (BEGAN) implements an equilibrium based loss function and an auto-encoding discriminator to better balance the performance of the generator and the discriminator. In this work we investigate a network…
Nagoya Institute of Technology（名古屋工业大学）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）；Osaka City University（大阪市立大学）
The paper presents a deep learning-aided iterative detection algorithm for massive overloaded MIMO systems. Since the proposed algorithm is based on the projected gradient descent method with trainable parameters, it is named as trainable projected descent-detector (TPG-detector). The trainable internal parameters can be optimized with standard deep learning techniques such as back propagation and stochastic gradient descent algorithms. This approach referred to as data-driven tuning brings notable advantages of the proposed scheme such as fast convergence. The numerical experiments show that …
We study estimation of a gradient-sparse parameter vector $\boldsymbolθ^* \in \mathbb{R}^p$, having strong gradient-sparsity $s^*:=\|\nabla_G \boldsymbolθ^*\|_0$ on an underlying graph $G$. Given observations $Z_1,\ldots,Z_n$ and a smooth, convex loss function $\mathcal{L}$ for which $\boldsymbolθ^*$ minimizes the population risk $\mathbb{E}[\mathcal{L}(\boldsymbolθ;Z_1,\ldots,Z_n)]$, we propose to estimate $\boldsymbolθ^*$ by a projected gradient descent algorithm that iteratively and approximately projects gradient steps onto spaces of vectors having small gradient-sparsity over low-degree s…
Ill-posed linear inverse problems appear in many scientific setups, and are typically addressed by solving optimization problems, which are composed of data fidelity and prior terms. Recently, several works have considered a back-projection (BP) based fidelity term as an alternative to the common least squares (LS), and demonstrated excellent results for popular inverse problems. These works have also empirically shown that using the BP term, rather than the LS term, requires fewer iterations of optimization algorithms. In this paper, we examine the convergence rate of the projected gradient d…
We consider infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision problems with finite state and action spaces and study the convergence rates of the projected policy gradient method and a general class of policy mirror descent methods, all with direct parametrization in the policy space. First, we develop a theory of weak gradient-mapping dominance and use it to prove sharper sublinear convergence rate of the projected policy gradient method. Then we show that with geometrically increasing step sizes, a general class of policy mirror descent methods, including the natural policy gradient method and a p…
Neural Network Surrogate and Projected Gradient Descent for Fast and Reliable Finite Element Model Calibration: a Case Study on an Intervertebral Disc
Institute for Neuroradiology, TUM University Hospital, School of Medicine and Health, Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学神经放射学研究所，慕尼黑工业大学医院，医学与健康学院）；Chair for AI in Healthcare and Medicine, Technical University of Munich (TUM) and TUM University Hospital（慕尼黑工业大学医疗保健与医学人工智能主席席位，慕尼黑工业大学医院）；Department of Trauma and Reconstructive Surgery, University Hospital Halle, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg（马丁路德大学哈雷-维滕贝格分校哈雷大学医院创伤与重建外科）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, Federal University of Santa Catarina（圣卡塔琳娜联邦大学机械工程系）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, Federal University of Santa Maria（圣玛丽亚联邦大学机械工程系）；Associate Professorship of Sport Equipment and Sport Materials, School of Engineering and Design, Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学工程与设计学院运动装备与运动材料副教授席位）；Department of Computing, Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院计算机系）
Recent advances show that deep neural networks are not robust to deliberately crafted adversarial examples which many are generated by adding human imperceptible perturbation to clear input. Consider $l_2$ norms attacks, Project Gradient Descent (PGD) and the Carlini and Wagner (C\&W) attacks are the two main methods, where PGD control max perturbation for adversarial examples while C\&W approach treats perturbation as a regularization term optimized it with loss function together. If we carefully set parameters for any individual input, both methods become similar. In general, PGD attacks per…
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev（内盖夫本-古里安大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
The problem of least squares regression of a $d$-dimensional unknown parameter is considered. A stochastic gradient descent based algorithm with weighted iterate-averaging that uses a single pass over the data is studied and its convergence rate is analyzed. We first consider a bounded constraint set of the unknown parameter. Under some standard regularity assumptions, we provide an explicit $O(1/k)$ upper bound on the convergence rate, depending on the variance (due to the additive noise in the measurements) and the size of the constraint set. We show that the variance term dominates the erro…
Nagoya Institute of Technology（名古屋工业大学）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）
Sparsely spread code division multiple access (SCDMA) is a promising non-orthogonal multiple access technique for future wireless communications. In this paper, we propose a novel trainable multiuser detector called sparse trainable projected gradient (STPG) detector, which is based on the notion of deep unfolding. In the STPG detector, trainable parameters are embedded to a projected gradient descent algorithm, which can be trained by standard deep learning techniques such as back propagation and stochastic gradient descent. Advantages of the detector are its low computational cost and small …
This work analyzes the solution trajectory of gradient-based algorithms via a novel basis function decomposition. We show that, although solution trajectories of gradient-based algorithms may vary depending on the learning task, they behave almost monotonically when projected onto an appropriate orthonormal function basis. Such projection gives rise to a basis function decomposition of the solution trajectory. Theoretically, we use our proposed basis function decomposition to establish the convergence of gradient descent (GD) on several representative learning tasks. In particular, we improve …
Nagoya Institute of Technology（名古屋工业大学）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）；Kyoto University（京都大学）；Osaka City University（大阪市立大学）
This paper presents a deep learning-aided iterative detection algorithm for massive overloaded multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems where the number of transmit antennas $n$ is larger than that of receive antennas $m$. Since the proposed algorithm is based on the projected gradient descent method with trainable parameters, it is named the trainable projected gradient-detector (TPG-detector). The trainable internal parameters, such as the step-size parameter, can be optimized with standard deep learning techniques, i.e., the back propagation and stochastic gradient descent algorithms. …
Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Weizmann Institute（魏茨曼科学研究所）；Université Paris-Dauphine（巴黎第九大学）
We extend the Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) algorithm to compactly supported measures via a projection step, akin to projected Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). We show that (projected) LMC allows to sample in polynomial time from a log-concave distribution with smooth potential. This gives a new Markov chain to sample from a log-concave distribution. Our main result shows in particular that when the target distribution is uniform, LMC mixes in $\tilde{O}(n^7)$ steps (where $n$ is the dimension). We also provide preliminary experimental evidence that LMC performs at least as well as hit-and-run,…
This paper studies the equitable and optimal transport (EOT) problem, which has many applications such as fair division problems and optimal transport with multiple agents etc. In the discrete distributions case, the EOT problem can be formulated as a linear program (LP). Since this LP is prohibitively large for general LP solvers, Scetbon \etal \cite{scetbon2021equitable} suggests to perturb the problem by adding an entropy regularization. They proposed a projected alternating maximization algorithm (PAM) to solve the dual of the entropy regularized EOT. In this paper, we provide the first co…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
We study the properties of alignment, a form of implicit regularization, in linear neural networks under gradient descent. We define alignment for fully connected networks with multidimensional outputs and show that it is a natural extension of alignment in networks with 1-dimensional outputs as defined by Ji and Telgarsky, 2018. While in fully connected networks, there always exists a global minimum corresponding to an aligned solution, we analyze alignment as it relates to the training process. Namely, we characterize when alignment is an invariant of training under gradient descent by provi…
Convex Relaxation for Solving Large-Margin Classifiers in Hyperbolic Space
John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University（哈佛大学约翰·A·保尔森工程与应用科学学院）；Center for Brain Science, Harvard University（哈佛大学脑科学中心）；Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence, Harvard University（哈佛大学肯普ner自然与人工智能研究所）
Langevin algorithms are gradient descent methods with additive noise. They have been used for decades in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, optimization, and learning. Their convergence properties for unconstrained non-convex optimization and learning problems have been studied widely in the last few years. Other work has examined projected Langevin algorithms for sampling from log-concave distributions restricted to convex compact sets. For learning and optimization, log-concave distributions correspond to convex losses. In this paper, we analyze the case of non-convex losses with comp…
Motivated by the problem of online canonical correlation analysis, we propose the \emph{Stochastic Scaled-Gradient Descent} (SSGD) algorithm for minimizing the expectation of a stochastic function over a generic Riemannian manifold. SSGD generalizes the idea of projected stochastic gradient descent and allows the use of scaled stochastic gradients instead of stochastic gradients. In the special case of a spherical constraint, which arises in generalized eigenvector problems, we establish a nonasymptotic finite-sample bound of $\sqrt{1/T}$, and show that this rate is minimax optimal, up to a po…
Neural networks are achieving state of the art and sometimes super-human performance on learning tasks across a variety of domains. Whenever these problems require learning in a continual or sequential manner, however, neural networks suffer from the problem of catastrophic forgetting; they forget how to solve previous tasks after being trained on a new task, despite having the essential capacity to solve both tasks if they were trained on both simultaneously. In this paper, we propose to address this issue from a parameter space perspective and study an approach to restrict the direction of t…
Huawei Technologies Ltd, French Research Center（华为技术有限公司法国研究中心）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Université Côte d’Azur（蔚蓝海岸大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）
Projected gradient descent has been proved efficient in many optimization and machine learning problems. The weighted $\ell_1$ ball has been shown effective in sparse system identification and features selection. In this paper we propose three new efficient algorithms for projecting any vector of finite length onto the weighted $\ell_1$ ball. The first two algorithms have a linear worst case complexity. The third one has a highly competitive performances in practice but the worst case has a quadratic complexity. These new algorithms are efficient tools for machine learning methods based on pro…
In this paper we study the problem of learning Rectified Linear Units (ReLUs) which are functions of the form $max(0,<w,x>)$ with $w$ denoting the weight vector. We study this problem in the high-dimensional regime where the number of observations are fewer than the dimension of the weight vector. We assume that the weight vector belongs to some closed set (convex or nonconvex) which captures known side-information about its structure. We focus on the realizable model where the inputs are chosen i.i.d.~from a Gaussian distribution and the labels are generated according to a planted weight vect…
Boston University（波士顿大学）；Google DeepMind（谷歌DeepMind）
We consider worker skill estimation for the single-coin Dawid-Skene crowdsourcing model. In practice, skill-estimation is challenging because worker assignments are sparse and irregular due to the arbitrary and uncontrolled availability of workers. We formulate skill estimation as a rank-one correlation-matrix completion problem, where the observed components correspond to observed label correlations between workers. We show that the correlation matrix can be successfully recovered and skills are identifiable if and only if the sampling matrix (observed components) does not have a bipartite co…
Geodesic Gradient Descent: A Generic and Learning-rate-free Optimizer on Objective Function-induced Manifolds
School of Information Science and Engineering, Hebei University of Science and Technology（信息科学与工程学院，河北科技大学）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（计算机科学与工程学院，电子科技大学）；International Institute of Next Generation Internet, Macau University of Science and Technology（下一代互联网国际研究院，澳门科技大学）
Texas Tech University（德州理工大学）；North Dakota State University（北达科他州立大学）；New Jersey Institute of Technology（新泽西理工学院）
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and projected stochastic gradient descent (PSGD) are scalable algorithms to compute model parameters in unconstrained and constrained optimization problems. In comparison with SGD, PSGD forces its iterative values into the constrained parameter space via projection. From a statistical point of view, this paper studies the limiting distribution of PSGD-based estimate when the true parameters satisfy some linear-equality constraints. Our theoretical findings reveal the role of projection played in the uncertainty of the PSGD-based estimate. As a byproduct, we pr…
