Daily Papers

We increase overhead for applications that rely on reasoning LLMs-we force models to spend an amplified number of reasoning tokens, i.e., "overthink", to respond to the user query while providing contextually correct answers. The adversary performs an OVERTHINK attack by injecting decoy reasoning problems into the public content that is used by the reasoning LLM (e.g., for RAG applications) during inference time. Due to the nature of our decoy problems (e.g., a Markov Decision Process), modified texts do not violate safety guardrails. We evaluated our attack across closed-(OpenAI o1, o1-mini, o3-mini) and open-(DeepSeek R1) weights reasoning models on the FreshQA and SQuAD datasets. Our results show up to 18x slowdown on FreshQA dataset and 46x slowdown on SQuAD dataset. The attack also shows high transferability across models. To protect applications, we discuss and implement defenses leveraging LLM-based and system design approaches. Finally, we discuss societal, financial, and energy impacts of OVERTHINK attack which could amplify the costs for third-party applications operating reasoning models.

Adversarial attacks in reinforcement learning (RL) often assume highly-privileged access to the victim's parameters, environment, or data. Instead, this paper proposes a novel adversarial setting called a Cheap Talk MDP in which an Adversary can merely append deterministic messages to the Victim's observation, resulting in a minimal range of influence. The Adversary cannot occlude ground truth, influence underlying environment dynamics or reward signals, introduce non-stationarity, add stochasticity, see the Victim's actions, or access their parameters. Additionally, we present a simple meta-learning algorithm called Adversarial Cheap Talk (ACT) to train Adversaries in this setting. We demonstrate that an Adversary trained with ACT still significantly influences the Victim's training and testing performance, despite the highly constrained setting. Affecting train-time performance reveals a new attack vector and provides insight into the success and failure modes of existing RL algorithms. More specifically, we show that an ACT Adversary is capable of harming performance by interfering with the learner's function approximation, or instead helping the Victim's performance by outputting useful features. Finally, we show that an ACT Adversary can manipulate messages during train-time to directly and arbitrarily control the Victim at test-time. Project video and code are available at https://sites.google.com/view/adversarial-cheap-talk

We investigate a new threat to neural sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models: training-time attacks that cause models to "spin" their outputs so as to support an adversary-chosen sentiment or point of view -- but only when the input contains adversary-chosen trigger words. For example, a spinned summarization model outputs positive summaries of any text that mentions the name of some individual or organization. Model spinning introduces a "meta-backdoor" into a model. Whereas conventional backdoors cause models to produce incorrect outputs on inputs with the trigger, outputs of spinned models preserve context and maintain standard accuracy metrics, yet also satisfy a meta-task chosen by the adversary. Model spinning enables propaganda-as-a-service, where propaganda is defined as biased speech. An adversary can create customized language models that produce desired spins for chosen triggers, then deploy these models to generate disinformation (a platform attack), or else inject them into ML training pipelines (a supply-chain attack), transferring malicious functionality to downstream models trained by victims. To demonstrate the feasibility of model spinning, we develop a new backdooring technique. It stacks an adversarial meta-task onto a seq2seq model, backpropagates the desired meta-task output to points in the word-embedding space we call "pseudo-words," and uses pseudo-words to shift the entire output distribution of the seq2seq model. We evaluate this attack on language generation, summarization, and translation models with different triggers and meta-tasks such as sentiment, toxicity, and entailment. Spinned models largely maintain their accuracy metrics (ROUGE and BLEU) while shifting their outputs to satisfy the adversary's meta-task. We also show that, in the case of a supply-chain attack, the spin functionality transfers to downstream models.

With increasingly more data and computation involved in their training, machine learning models constitute valuable intellectual property. This has spurred interest in model stealing, which is made more practical by advances in learning with partial, little, or no supervision. Existing defenses focus on inserting unique watermarks in a model's decision surface, but this is insufficient: the watermarks are not sampled from the training distribution and thus are not always preserved during model stealing. In this paper, we make the key observation that knowledge contained in the stolen model's training set is what is common to all stolen copies. The adversary's goal, irrespective of the attack employed, is always to extract this knowledge or its by-products. This gives the original model's owner a strong advantage over the adversary: model owners have access to the original training data. We thus introduce dataset inference, the process of identifying whether a suspected model copy has private knowledge from the original model's dataset, as a defense against model stealing. We develop an approach for dataset inference that combines statistical testing with the ability to estimate the distance of multiple data points to the decision boundary. Our experiments on CIFAR10, SVHN, CIFAR100 and ImageNet show that model owners can claim with confidence greater than 99% that their model (or dataset as a matter of fact) was stolen, despite only exposing 50 of the stolen model's training points. Dataset inference defends against state-of-the-art attacks even when the adversary is adaptive. Unlike prior work, it does not require retraining or overfitting the defended model.

This paper studies extractable memorization: training data that an adversary can efficiently extract by querying a machine learning model without prior knowledge of the training dataset. We show an adversary can extract gigabytes of training data from open-source language models like Pythia or GPT-Neo, semi-open models like LLaMA or Falcon, and closed models like ChatGPT. Existing techniques from the literature suffice to attack unaligned models; in order to attack the aligned ChatGPT, we develop a new divergence attack that causes the model to diverge from its chatbot-style generations and emit training data at a rate 150x higher than when behaving properly. Our methods show practical attacks can recover far more data than previously thought, and reveal that current alignment techniques do not eliminate memorization.

A multimodal large language model (MLLM) agent can receive instructions, capture images, retrieve histories from memory, and decide which tools to use. Nonetheless, red-teaming efforts have revealed that adversarial images/prompts can jailbreak an MLLM and cause unaligned behaviors. In this work, we report an even more severe safety issue in multi-agent environments, referred to as infectious jailbreak. It entails the adversary simply jailbreaking a single agent, and without any further intervention from the adversary, (almost) all agents will become infected exponentially fast and exhibit harmful behaviors. To validate the feasibility of infectious jailbreak, we simulate multi-agent environments containing up to one million LLaVA-1.5 agents, and employ randomized pair-wise chat as a proof-of-concept instantiation for multi-agent interaction. Our results show that feeding an (infectious) adversarial image into the memory of any randomly chosen agent is sufficient to achieve infectious jailbreak. Finally, we derive a simple principle for determining whether a defense mechanism can provably restrain the spread of infectious jailbreak, but how to design a practical defense that meets this principle remains an open question to investigate. Our project page is available at https://sail-sg.github.io/Agent-Smith/.

When large language models are trained on private data, it can be a significant privacy risk for them to memorize and regurgitate sensitive information. In this work, we propose a new practical data extraction attack that we call "neural phishing". This attack enables an adversary to target and extract sensitive or personally identifiable information (PII), e.g., credit card numbers, from a model trained on user data with upwards of 10% attack success rates, at times, as high as 50%. Our attack assumes only that an adversary can insert as few as 10s of benign-appearing sentences into the training dataset using only vague priors on the structure of the user data.

In the field of algorithmic fairness, significant attention has been put on group fairness criteria, such as Demographic Parity and Equalized Odds. Nevertheless, these objectives, measured as global averages, have raised concerns about persistent local disparities between sensitive groups. In this work, we address the problem of local fairness, which ensures that the predictor is unbiased not only in terms of expectations over the whole population, but also within any subregion of the feature space, unknown at training time. To enforce this objective, we introduce ROAD, a novel approach that leverages the Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) framework within a fair adversarial learning objective, where an adversary tries to infer the sensitive attribute from the predictions. Using an instance-level re-weighting strategy, ROAD is designed to prioritize inputs that are likely to be locally unfair, i.e. where the adversary faces the least difficulty in reconstructing the sensitive attribute. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method: it achieves Pareto dominance with respect to local fairness and accuracy for a given global fairness level across three standard datasets, and also enhances fairness generalization under distribution shift.

Transfer learning is a popular method for tuning pretrained (upstream) models for different downstream tasks using limited data and computational resources. We study how an adversary with control over an upstream model used in transfer learning can conduct property inference attacks on a victim's tuned downstream model. For example, to infer the presence of images of a specific individual in the downstream training set. We demonstrate attacks in which an adversary can manipulate the upstream model to conduct highly effective and specific property inference attacks (AUC score > 0.9), without incurring significant performance loss on the main task. The main idea of the manipulation is to make the upstream model generate activations (intermediate features) with different distributions for samples with and without a target property, thus enabling the adversary to distinguish easily between downstream models trained with and without training examples that have the target property. Our code is available at https://github.com/yulongt23/Transfer-Inference.

What should a malicious user write next to fool a detection model? Identifying malicious users is critical to ensure the safety and integrity of internet platforms. Several deep learning-based detection models have been created. However, malicious users can evade deep detection models by manipulating their behavior, rendering these models of little use. The vulnerability of such deep detection models against adversarial attacks is unknown. Here we create a novel adversarial attack model against deep user sequence embedding based classification models, which use the sequence of user posts to generate user embeddings and detect malicious users. In the attack, the adversary generates a new post to fool the classifier. We propose a novel end-to-end Personalized Text Generation Attack model, called PETGEN, that simultaneously reduces the efficacy of the detection model and generates posts that have several key desirable properties. Specifically, PETGEN generates posts that are personalized to the user's writing style, have knowledge about a given target context, are aware of the user's historical posts on the target context, and encapsulate the user's recent topical interests. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets (Yelp and Wikipedia, both with ground-truth of malicious users) to show that PETGEN significantly reduces the performance of popular deep user sequence embedding-based classification models. PETGEN outperforms five attack baselines in terms of text quality and attack efficacy in both white-box and black-box classifier settings. Overall, this work paves the path towards the next generation of adversary-aware sequence classification models.

Instruction tuning is an effective technique to align large language models (LLMs) with human intents. In this work, we investigate how an adversary can exploit instruction tuning by injecting specific instruction-following examples into the training data that intentionally changes the model's behavior. For example, an adversary can achieve content injection by injecting training examples that mention target content and eliciting such behavior from downstream models. To achieve this goal, we propose AutoPoison, an automated data poisoning pipeline. It naturally and coherently incorporates versatile attack goals into poisoned data with the help of an oracle LLM. We showcase two example attacks: content injection and over-refusal attacks, each aiming to induce a specific exploitable behavior. We quantify and benchmark the strength and the stealthiness of our data poisoning scheme. Our results show that AutoPoison allows an adversary to change a model's behavior by poisoning only a small fraction of data while maintaining a high level of stealthiness in the poisoned examples. We hope our work sheds light on how data quality affects the behavior of instruction-tuned models and raises awareness of the importance of data quality for responsible deployments of LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/azshue/AutoPoison.

A membership inference attack allows an adversary to query a trained machine learning model to predict whether or not a particular example was contained in the model's training dataset. These attacks are currently evaluated using average-case "accuracy" metrics that fail to characterize whether the attack can confidently identify any members of the training set. We argue that attacks should instead be evaluated by computing their true-positive rate at low (e.g., <0.1%) false-positive rates, and find most prior attacks perform poorly when evaluated in this way. To address this we develop a Likelihood Ratio Attack (LiRA) that carefully combines multiple ideas from the literature. Our attack is 10x more powerful at low false-positive rates, and also strictly dominates prior attacks on existing metrics.

Among adversarial attacks against sequential recommender systems, model extraction attacks represent a method to attack sequential recommendation models without prior knowledge. Existing research has primarily concentrated on the adversary's execution of black-box attacks through data-free model extraction. However, a significant gap remains in the literature concerning the development of surrogate models by adversaries with access to few-shot raw data (10\% even less). That is, the challenge of how to construct a surrogate model with high functional similarity within the context of few-shot data scenarios remains an issue that requires resolution.This study addresses this gap by introducing a novel few-shot model extraction framework against sequential recommenders, which is designed to construct a superior surrogate model with the utilization of few-shot data. The proposed few-shot model extraction framework is comprised of two components: an autoregressive augmentation generation strategy and a bidirectional repair loss-facilitated model distillation procedure. Specifically, to generate synthetic data that closely approximate the distribution of raw data, autoregressive augmentation generation strategy integrates a probabilistic interaction sampler to extract inherent dependencies and a synthesis determinant signal module to characterize user behavioral patterns. Subsequently, bidirectional repair loss, which target the discrepancies between the recommendation lists, is designed as auxiliary loss to rectify erroneous predictions from surrogate models, transferring knowledge from the victim model to the surrogate model effectively. Experiments on three datasets show that the proposed few-shot model extraction framework yields superior surrogate models.

We present the first undetectable watermarking scheme for generative image models. Undetectability ensures that no efficient adversary can distinguish between watermarked and un-watermarked images, even after making many adaptive queries. In particular, an undetectable watermark does not degrade image quality under any efficiently computable metric. Our scheme works by selecting the initial latents of a diffusion model using a pseudorandom error-correcting code (Christ and Gunn, 2024), a strategy which guarantees undetectability and robustness. We experimentally demonstrate that our watermarks are quality-preserving and robust using Stable Diffusion 2.1. Our experiments verify that, in contrast to every prior scheme we tested, our watermark does not degrade image quality. Our experiments also demonstrate robustness: existing watermark removal attacks fail to remove our watermark from images without significantly degrading the quality of the images. Finally, we find that we can robustly encode 512 bits in our watermark, and up to 2500 bits when the images are not subjected to watermark removal attacks. Our code is available at https://github.com/XuandongZhao/PRC-Watermark.

Modern machine learning models are sensitive to the manipulation of both the training data (poisoning attacks) and inference data (adversarial examples). Recognizing this issue, the community has developed many empirical defenses against both attacks and, more recently, provable certification methods against inference-time attacks. However, such guarantees are still largely lacking for training-time attacks. In this work, we present FullCert, the first end-to-end certifier with sound, deterministic bounds, which proves robustness against both training-time and inference-time attacks. We first bound all possible perturbations an adversary can make to the training data under the considered threat model. Using these constraints, we bound the perturbations' influence on the model's parameters. Finally, we bound the impact of these parameter changes on the model's prediction, resulting in joint robustness guarantees against poisoning and adversarial examples. To facilitate this novel certification paradigm, we combine our theoretical work with a new open-source library BoundFlow, which enables model training on bounded datasets. We experimentally demonstrate FullCert's feasibility on two different datasets.

Recently, self-supervised learning (SSL) was shown to be vulnerable to patch-based data poisoning backdoor attacks. It was shown that an adversary can poison a small part of the unlabeled data so that when a victim trains an SSL model on it, the final model will have a backdoor that the adversary can exploit. This work aims to defend self-supervised learning against such attacks. We use a three-step defense pipeline, where we first train a model on the poisoned data. In the second step, our proposed defense algorithm (PatchSearch) uses the trained model to search the training data for poisoned samples and removes them from the training set. In the third step, a final model is trained on the cleaned-up training set. Our results show that PatchSearch is an effective defense. As an example, it improves a model's accuracy on images containing the trigger from 38.2% to 63.7% which is very close to the clean model's accuracy, 64.6%. Moreover, we show that PatchSearch outperforms baselines and state-of-the-art defense approaches including those using additional clean, trusted data. Our code is available at https://github.com/UCDvision/PatchSearch

Recent advancements in pre-trained language models have enabled convenient methods for generating human-like text at a large scale. Though these generation capabilities hold great potential for breakthrough applications, it can also be a tool for an adversary to generate misinformation. In particular, social media platforms like Twitter are highly susceptible to AI-generated misinformation. A potential threat scenario is when an adversary hijacks a credible user account and incorporates a natural language generator to generate misinformation. Such threats necessitate automated detectors for AI-generated tweets in a given user's Twitter timeline. However, tweets are inherently short, thus making it difficult for current state-of-the-art pre-trained language model-based detectors to accurately detect at what point the AI starts to generate tweets in a given Twitter timeline. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm using stylometric signals to aid detecting AI-generated tweets. We propose models corresponding to quantifying stylistic changes in human and AI tweets in two related tasks: Task 1 - discriminate between human and AI-generated tweets, and Task 2 - detect if and when an AI starts to generate tweets in a given Twitter timeline. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the stylometric features are effective in augmenting the state-of-the-art AI-generated text detectors.

In the experts problem, on each of T days, an agent needs to follow the advice of one of n ``experts''. After each day, the loss associated with each expert's advice is revealed. A fundamental result in learning theory says that the agent can achieve vanishing regret, i.e. their cumulative loss is within o(T) of the cumulative loss of the best-in-hindsight expert. Can the agent perform well without sufficient space to remember all the experts? We extend a nascent line of research on this question in two directions: bullet We give a new algorithm against the oblivious adversary, improving over the memory-regret tradeoff obtained by [PZ23], and nearly matching the lower bound of [SWXZ22]. bullet We also consider an adaptive adversary who can observe past experts chosen by the agent. In this setting we give both a new algorithm and a novel lower bound, proving that roughly n memory is both necessary and sufficient for obtaining o(T) regret.

There has been a recent paradigm shift in robotics to data-driven learning for planning and control. Due to large number of experiences required for training, most of these approaches use a self-supervised paradigm: using sensors to measure success/failure. However, in most cases, these sensors provide weak supervision at best. In this work, we propose an adversarial learning framework that pits an adversary against the robot learning the task. In an effort to defeat the adversary, the original robot learns to perform the task with more robustness leading to overall improved performance. We show that this adversarial framework forces the the robot to learn a better grasping model in order to overcome the adversary. By grasping 82% of presented novel objects compared to 68% without an adversary, we demonstrate the utility of creating adversaries. We also demonstrate via experiments that having robots in adversarial setting might be a better learning strategy as compared to having collaborative multiple robots.

Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) have emerged as a valuable framework for evaluating privacy leakage by machine learning models. Score-based MIAs are distinguished, in particular, by their ability to exploit the confidence scores that the model generates for particular inputs. Existing score-based MIAs implicitly assume that the adversary has access to the target model's hyperparameters, which can be used to train the shadow models for the attack. In this work, we demonstrate that the knowledge of target hyperparameters is not a prerequisite for MIA in the transfer learning setting. Based on this, we propose a novel approach to select the hyperparameters for training the shadow models for MIA when the attacker has no prior knowledge about them by matching the output distributions of target and shadow models. We demonstrate that using the new approach yields hyperparameters that lead to an attack near indistinguishable in performance from an attack that uses target hyperparameters to train the shadow models. Furthermore, we study the empirical privacy risk of unaccounted use of training data for hyperparameter optimization (HPO) in differentially private (DP) transfer learning. We find no statistically significant evidence that performing HPO using training data would increase vulnerability to MIA.

Evaluating deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents against targeted behavior attacks is critical for assessing their robustness. These attacks aim to manipulate the victim into specific behaviors that align with the attacker's objectives, often bypassing traditional reward-based defenses. Prior methods have primarily focused on reducing cumulative rewards; however, rewards are typically too generic to capture complex safety requirements effectively. As a result, focusing solely on reward reduction can lead to suboptimal attack strategies, particularly in safety-critical scenarios where more precise behavior manipulation is needed. To address these challenges, we propose RAT, a method designed for universal, targeted behavior attacks. RAT trains an intention policy that is explicitly aligned with human preferences, serving as a precise behavioral target for the adversary. Concurrently, an adversary manipulates the victim's policy to follow this target behavior. To enhance the effectiveness of these attacks, RAT dynamically adjusts the state occupancy measure within the replay buffer, allowing for more controlled and effective behavior manipulation. Our empirical results on robotic simulation tasks demonstrate that RAT outperforms existing adversarial attack algorithms in inducing specific behaviors. Additionally, RAT shows promise in improving agent robustness, leading to more resilient policies. We further validate RAT by guiding Decision Transformer agents to adopt behaviors aligned with human preferences in various MuJoCo tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness across diverse tasks.

Watermarking is an essential technique for embedding an identifier (i.e., watermark message) within digital images to assert ownership and monitor unauthorized alterations. In face recognition systems, watermarking plays a pivotal role in ensuring data integrity and security. However, an adversary could potentially interfere with the watermarking process, significantly impairing recognition performance. We explore the interaction between watermarking and adversarial attacks on face recognition models. Our findings reveal that while watermarking or input-level perturbation alone may have a negligible effect on recognition accuracy, the combined effect of watermarking and perturbation can result in an adversarial watermarking attack, significantly degrading recognition performance. Specifically, we introduce a novel threat model, the adversarial watermarking attack, which remains stealthy in the absence of watermarking, allowing images to be correctly recognized initially. However, once watermarking is applied, the attack is activated, causing recognition failures. Our study reveals a previously unrecognized vulnerability: adversarial perturbations can exploit the watermark message to evade face recognition systems. Evaluated on the CASIA-WebFace dataset, our proposed adversarial watermarking attack reduces face matching accuracy by 67.2% with an ell_infty norm-measured perturbation strength of {2}/{255} and by 95.9% with a strength of {4}/{255}.

Large language models (LLMs) can often be made to behave in undesirable ways that they are explicitly fine-tuned not to. For example, the LLM red-teaming literature has produced a wide variety of 'jailbreaking' techniques to elicit harmful text from models that were fine-tuned to be harmless. Recent work on red-teaming, model editing, and interpretability suggests that this challenge stems from how (adversarial) fine-tuning largely serves to suppress rather than remove undesirable capabilities from LLMs. Prior work has introduced latent adversarial training (LAT) as a way to improve robustness to broad classes of failures. These prior works have considered untargeted latent space attacks where the adversary perturbs latent activations to maximize loss on examples of desirable behavior. Untargeted LAT can provide a generic type of robustness but does not leverage information about specific failure modes. Here, we experiment with targeted LAT where the adversary seeks to minimize loss on a specific competing task. We find that it can augment a wide variety of state-of-the-art methods. First, we use targeted LAT to improve robustness to jailbreaks, outperforming a strong R2D2 baseline with orders of magnitude less compute. Second, we use it to more effectively remove backdoors with no knowledge of the trigger. Finally, we use it to more effectively unlearn knowledge for specific undesirable tasks in a way that is also more robust to re-learning. Overall, our results suggest that targeted LAT can be an effective tool for defending against harmful behaviors from LLMs.

Transferable targeted adversarial attacks aim to mislead models into outputting adversary-specified predictions in black-box scenarios. Recent studies have introduced single-target generative attacks that train a generator for each target class to generate highly transferable perturbations, resulting in substantial computational overhead when handling multiple classes. Multi-target attacks address this by training only one class-conditional generator for multiple classes. However, the generator simply uses class labels as conditions, failing to leverage the rich semantic information of the target class. To this end, we design a CLIP-guided Generative Network with Cross-attention modules (CGNC) to enhance multi-target attacks by incorporating textual knowledge of CLIP into the generator. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CGNC yields significant improvements over previous multi-target generative attacks, e.g., a 21.46\% improvement in success rate from ResNet-152 to DenseNet-121. Moreover, we propose a masked fine-tuning mechanism to further strengthen our method in attacking a single class, which surpasses existing single-target methods.

The vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial patches has motivated numerous defense strategies for boosting model robustness. However, the prevailing defenses depend on single observation or pre-established adversary information to counter adversarial patches, often failing to be confronted with unseen or adaptive adversarial attacks and easily exhibiting unsatisfying performance in dynamic 3D environments. Inspired by active human perception and recurrent feedback mechanisms, we develop Embodied Active Defense (EAD), a proactive defensive strategy that actively contextualizes environmental information to address misaligned adversarial patches in 3D real-world settings. To achieve this, EAD develops two central recurrent sub-modules, i.e., a perception module and a policy module, to implement two critical functions of active vision. These models recurrently process a series of beliefs and observations, facilitating progressive refinement of their comprehension of the target object and enabling the development of strategic actions to counter adversarial patches in 3D environments. To optimize learning efficiency, we incorporate a differentiable approximation of environmental dynamics and deploy patches that are agnostic to the adversary strategies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EAD substantially enhances robustness against a variety of patches within just a few steps through its action policy in safety-critical tasks (e.g., face recognition and object detection), without compromising standard accuracy. Furthermore, due to the attack-agnostic characteristic, EAD facilitates excellent generalization to unseen attacks, diminishing the averaged attack success rate by 95 percent across a range of unseen adversarial attacks.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely deployed on real-world devices. Concerns regarding their security have gained great attention from researchers. Recently, a new weight modification attack called bit flip attack (BFA) was proposed, which exploits memory fault inject techniques such as row hammer to attack quantized models in the deployment stage. With only a few bit flips, the target model can be rendered useless as a random guesser or even be implanted with malicious functionalities. In this work, we seek to further reduce the number of bit flips. We propose a training-assisted bit flip attack, in which the adversary is involved in the training stage to build a high-risk model to release. This high-risk model, obtained coupled with a corresponding malicious model, behaves normally and can escape various detection methods. The results on benchmark datasets show that an adversary can easily convert this high-risk but normal model to a malicious one on victim's side by flipping only one critical bit on average in the deployment stage. Moreover, our attack still poses a significant threat even when defenses are employed. The codes for reproducing main experiments are available at https://github.com/jianshuod/TBA.

While the transferability property of adversarial examples allows the adversary to perform black-box attacks (i.e., the attacker has no knowledge about the target model), the transfer-based adversarial attacks have gained great attention. Previous works mostly study gradient variation or image transformations to amplify the distortion on critical parts of inputs. These methods can work on transferring across models with limited differences, i.e., from CNNs to CNNs, but always fail in transferring across models with wide differences, such as from CNNs to ViTs. Alternatively, model ensemble adversarial attacks are proposed to fuse outputs from surrogate models with diverse architectures to get an ensemble loss, making the generated adversarial example more likely to transfer to other models as it can fool multiple models concurrently. However, existing ensemble attacks simply fuse the outputs of the surrogate models evenly, thus are not efficacious to capture and amplify the intrinsic transfer information of adversarial examples. In this paper, we propose an adaptive ensemble attack, dubbed AdaEA, to adaptively control the fusion of the outputs from each model, via monitoring the discrepancy ratio of their contributions towards the adversarial objective. Furthermore, an extra disparity-reduced filter is introduced to further synchronize the update direction. As a result, we achieve considerable improvement over the existing ensemble attacks on various datasets, and the proposed AdaEA can also boost existing transfer-based attacks, which further demonstrates its efficacy and versatility.

Privacy estimation techniques for differentially private (DP) algorithms are useful for comparing against analytical bounds, or to empirically measure privacy loss in settings where known analytical bounds are not tight. However, existing privacy auditing techniques usually make strong assumptions on the adversary (e.g., knowledge of intermediate model iterates or the training data distribution), are tailored to specific tasks, model architectures, or DP algorithm, and/or require retraining the model many times (typically on the order of thousands). These shortcomings make deploying such techniques at scale difficult in practice, especially in federated settings where model training can take days or weeks. In this work, we present a novel ``one-shot'' approach that can systematically address these challenges, allowing efficient auditing or estimation of the privacy loss of a model during the same, single training run used to fit model parameters, and without requiring any a priori knowledge about the model architecture, task, or DP training algorithm. We show that our method provides provably correct estimates for the privacy loss under the Gaussian mechanism, and we demonstrate its performance on well-established FL benchmark datasets under several adversarial threat models.

We study a new non-stochastic federated multi-armed bandit problem with multiple agents collaborating via a communication network. The losses of the arms are assigned by an oblivious adversary that specifies the loss of each arm not only for each time step but also for each agent, which we call ``doubly adversarial". In this setting, different agents may choose the same arm in the same time step but observe different feedback. The goal of each agent is to find a globally best arm in hindsight that has the lowest cumulative loss averaged over all agents, which necessities the communication among agents. We provide regret lower bounds for any federated bandit algorithm under different settings, when agents have access to full-information feedback, or the bandit feedback. For the bandit feedback setting, we propose a near-optimal federated bandit algorithm called FEDEXP3. Our algorithm gives a positive answer to an open question proposed in Cesa-Bianchi et al. (2016): FEDEXP3 can guarantee a sub-linear regret without exchanging sequences of selected arm identities or loss sequences among agents. We also provide numerical evaluations of our algorithm to validate our theoretical results and demonstrate its effectiveness on synthetic and real-world datasets

Deploying machine learning models in production may allow adversaries to infer sensitive information about training data. There is a vast literature analyzing different types of inference risks, ranging from membership inference to reconstruction attacks. Inspired by the success of games (i.e., probabilistic experiments) to study security properties in cryptography, some authors describe privacy inference risks in machine learning using a similar game-based style. However, adversary capabilities and goals are often stated in subtly different ways from one presentation to the other, which makes it hard to relate and compose results. In this paper, we present a game-based framework to systematize the body of knowledge on privacy inference risks in machine learning. We use this framework to (1) provide a unifying structure for definitions of inference risks, (2) formally establish known relations among definitions, and (3) to uncover hitherto unknown relations that would have been difficult to spot otherwise.

Privacy attacks on Machine Learning (ML) models often focus on inferring the existence of particular data points in the training data. However, what the adversary really wants to know is if a particular individual's (subject's) data was included during training. In such scenarios, the adversary is more likely to have access to the distribution of a particular subject than actual records. Furthermore, in settings like cross-silo Federated Learning (FL), a subject's data can be embodied by multiple data records that are spread across multiple organizations. Nearly all of the existing private FL literature is dedicated to studying privacy at two granularities -- item-level (individual data records), and user-level (participating user in the federation), neither of which apply to data subjects in cross-silo FL. This insight motivates us to shift our attention from the privacy of data records to the privacy of data subjects, also known as subject-level privacy. We propose two novel black-box attacks for subject membership inference, of which one assumes access to a model after each training round. Using these attacks, we estimate subject membership inference risk on real-world data for single-party models as well as FL scenarios. We find our attacks to be extremely potent, even without access to exact training records, and using the knowledge of membership for a handful of subjects. To better understand the various factors that may influence subject privacy risk in cross-silo FL settings, we systematically generate several hundred synthetic federation configurations, varying properties of the data, model design and training, and the federation itself. Finally, we investigate the effectiveness of Differential Privacy in mitigating this threat.

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models can be trained on sensitive information such as phone numbers, zip-codes etc. Recent literature has focused on Model Inversion Attacks (ModIvA) that can extract training data from model parameters. In this work, we present a version of such an attack by extracting canaries inserted in NLU training data. In the attack, an adversary with open-box access to the model reconstructs the canaries contained in the model's training set. We evaluate our approach by performing text completion on canaries and demonstrate that by using the prefix (non-sensitive) tokens of the canary, we can generate the full canary. As an example, our attack is able to reconstruct a four digit code in the training dataset of the NLU model with a probability of 0.5 in its best configuration. As countermeasures, we identify several defense mechanisms that, when combined, effectively eliminate the risk of ModIvA in our experiments.

We study a version of adversarial classification where an adversary is empowered to corrupt data inputs up to some distance varepsilon, using tools from variational analysis. In particular, we describe necessary conditions associated with the optimal classifier subject to such an adversary. Using the necessary conditions, we derive a geometric evolution equation which can be used to track the change in classification boundaries as varepsilon varies. This evolution equation may be described as an uncoupled system of differential equations in one dimension, or as a mean curvature type equation in higher dimension. In one dimension, and under mild assumptions on the data distribution, we rigorously prove that one can use the initial value problem starting from varepsilon=0, which is simply the Bayes classifier, in order to solve for the global minimizer of the adversarial problem for small values of varepsilon. In higher dimensions we provide a similar result, albeit conditional to the existence of regular solutions of the initial value problem. In the process of proving our main results we obtain a result of independent interest connecting the original adversarial problem with an optimal transport problem under no assumptions on whether classes are balanced or not. Numerical examples illustrating these ideas are also presented.

Recent work has demonstrated that deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples---inputs that are almost indistinguishable from natural data and yet classified incorrectly by the network. In fact, some of the latest findings suggest that the existence of adversarial attacks may be an inherent weakness of deep learning models. To address this problem, we study the adversarial robustness of neural networks through the lens of robust optimization. This approach provides us with a broad and unifying view on much of the prior work on this topic. Its principled nature also enables us to identify methods for both training and attacking neural networks that are reliable and, in a certain sense, universal. In particular, they specify a concrete security guarantee that would protect against any adversary. These methods let us train networks with significantly improved resistance to a wide range of adversarial attacks. They also suggest the notion of security against a first-order adversary as a natural and broad security guarantee. We believe that robustness against such well-defined classes of adversaries is an important stepping stone towards fully resistant deep learning models. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/MadryLab/mnist_challenge and https://github.com/MadryLab/cifar10_challenge.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models improve the efficiency and scalability of dense language models by routing each token to a small number of experts in each layer. In this paper, we show how an adversary that can arrange for their queries to appear in the same batch of examples as a victim's queries can exploit Expert-Choice-Routing to fully disclose a victim's prompt. We successfully demonstrate the effectiveness of this attack on a two-layer Mixtral model, exploiting the tie-handling behavior of the torch.topk CUDA implementation. Our results show that we can extract the entire prompt using O({VM}^2) queries (with vocabulary size V and prompt length M) or 100 queries on average per token in the setting we consider. This is the first attack to exploit architectural flaws for the purpose of extracting user prompts, introducing a new class of LLM vulnerabilities.

We introduce a state-of-the-art real-time, high-fidelity, audio codec leveraging neural networks. It consists in a streaming encoder-decoder architecture with quantized latent space trained in an end-to-end fashion. We simplify and speed-up the training by using a single multiscale spectrogram adversary that efficiently reduces artifacts and produce high-quality samples. We introduce a novel loss balancer mechanism to stabilize training: the weight of a loss now defines the fraction of the overall gradient it should represent, thus decoupling the choice of this hyper-parameter from the typical scale of the loss. Finally, we study how lightweight Transformer models can be used to further compress the obtained representation by up to 40%, while staying faster than real time. We provide a detailed description of the key design choices of the proposed model including: training objective, architectural changes and a study of various perceptual loss functions. We present an extensive subjective evaluation (MUSHRA tests) together with an ablation study for a range of bandwidths and audio domains, including speech, noisy-reverberant speech, and music. Our approach is superior to the baselines methods across all evaluated settings, considering both 24 kHz monophonic and 48 kHz stereophonic audio. Code and models are available at github.com/facebookresearch/encodec.

Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) are an integral part of modern AI that have led to breakthrough performances in complex AI tasks. Major AI companies with expensive infrastructures are able to develop and train these large models with billions and millions of parameters from scratch. Third parties, researchers, and practitioners are increasingly adopting these pre-trained models and fine-tuning them on their private data to accomplish their downstream AI tasks. However, it has been shown that an adversary can extract/reconstruct the exact training samples from these LLMs, which can lead to revealing personally identifiable information. The issue has raised deep concerns about the privacy of LLMs. Differential privacy (DP) provides a rigorous framework that allows adding noise in the process of training or fine-tuning LLMs such that extracting the training data becomes infeasible (i.e., with a cryptographically small success probability). While the theoretical privacy guarantees offered in most extant studies assume learning models from scratch through many training iterations in an asymptotic setting, this assumption does not hold in fine-tuning scenarios in which the number of training iterations is significantly smaller. To address the gap, we present \ewtune, a DP framework for fine-tuning LLMs based on Edgeworth accountant with finite-sample privacy guarantees. Our results across four well-established natural language understanding (NLU) tasks show that while \ewtune~adds privacy guarantees to LLM fine-tuning process, it directly contributes to decreasing the induced noise to up to 5.6\% and improves the state-of-the-art LLMs performance by up to 1.1\% across all NLU tasks. We have open-sourced our implementations for wide adoption and public testing purposes.

To perform adversarial attacks in the physical world, many studies have proposed adversarial camouflage, a method to hide a target object by applying camouflage patterns on 3D object surfaces. For obtaining optimal physical adversarial camouflage, previous studies have utilized the so-called neural renderer, as it supports differentiability. However, existing neural renderers cannot fully represent various real-world transformations due to a lack of control of scene parameters compared to the legacy photo-realistic renderers. In this paper, we propose the Differentiable Transformation Attack (DTA), a framework for generating a robust physical adversarial pattern on a target object to camouflage it against object detection models with a wide range of transformations. It utilizes our novel Differentiable Transformation Network (DTN), which learns the expected transformation of a rendered object when the texture is changed while preserving the original properties of the target object. Using our attack framework, an adversary can gain both the advantages of the legacy photo-realistic renderers including various physical-world transformations and the benefit of white-box access by offering differentiability. Our experiments show that our camouflaged 3D vehicles can successfully evade state-of-the-art object detection models in the photo-realistic environment (i.e., CARLA on Unreal Engine). Furthermore, our demonstration on a scaled Tesla Model 3 proves the applicability and transferability of our method to the real world.

It has become common to publish large (billion parameter) language models that have been trained on private datasets. This paper demonstrates that in such settings, an adversary can perform a training data extraction attack to recover individual training examples by querying the language model. We demonstrate our attack on GPT-2, a language model trained on scrapes of the public Internet, and are able to extract hundreds of verbatim text sequences from the model's training data. These extracted examples include (public) personally identifiable information (names, phone numbers, and email addresses), IRC conversations, code, and 128-bit UUIDs. Our attack is possible even though each of the above sequences are included in just one document in the training data. We comprehensively evaluate our extraction attack to understand the factors that contribute to its success. Worryingly, we find that larger models are more vulnerable than smaller models. We conclude by drawing lessons and discussing possible safeguards for training large language models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) enable a new ecosystem with many downstream applications, called LLM applications, with different natural language processing tasks. The functionality and performance of an LLM application highly depend on its system prompt, which instructs the backend LLM on what task to perform. Therefore, an LLM application developer often keeps a system prompt confidential to protect its intellectual property. As a result, a natural attack, called prompt leaking, is to steal the system prompt from an LLM application, which compromises the developer's intellectual property. Existing prompt leaking attacks primarily rely on manually crafted queries, and thus achieve limited effectiveness. In this paper, we design a novel, closed-box prompt leaking attack framework, called PLeak, to optimize an adversarial query such that when the attacker sends it to a target LLM application, its response reveals its own system prompt. We formulate finding such an adversarial query as an optimization problem and solve it with a gradient-based method approximately. Our key idea is to break down the optimization goal by optimizing adversary queries for system prompts incrementally, i.e., starting from the first few tokens of each system prompt step by step until the entire length of the system prompt. We evaluate PLeak in both offline settings and for real-world LLM applications, e.g., those on Poe, a popular platform hosting such applications. Our results show that PLeak can effectively leak system prompts and significantly outperforms not only baselines that manually curate queries but also baselines with optimized queries that are modified and adapted from existing jailbreaking attacks. We responsibly reported the issues to Poe and are still waiting for their response. Our implementation is available at this repository: https://github.com/BHui97/PLeak.

In various real-world applications such as machine translation, sentiment analysis, and question answering, a pivotal role is played by NLP models, facilitating efficient communication and decision-making processes in domains ranging from healthcare to finance. However, a significant challenge is posed to the robustness of these natural language processing models by text adversarial attacks. These attacks involve the deliberate manipulation of input text to mislead the predictions of the model while maintaining human interpretability. Despite the remarkable performance achieved by state-of-the-art models like BERT in various natural language processing tasks, they are found to remain vulnerable to adversarial perturbations in the input text. In addressing the vulnerability of text classifiers to adversarial attacks, three distinct attack mechanisms are explored in this paper using the victim model BERT: BERT-on-BERT attack, PWWS attack, and Fraud Bargain's Attack (FBA). Leveraging the IMDB, AG News, and SST2 datasets, a thorough comparative analysis is conducted to assess the effectiveness of these attacks on the BERT classifier model. It is revealed by the analysis that PWWS emerges as the most potent adversary, consistently outperforming other methods across multiple evaluation scenarios, thereby emphasizing its efficacy in generating adversarial examples for text classification. Through comprehensive experimentation, the performance of these attacks is assessed and the findings indicate that the PWWS attack outperforms others, demonstrating lower runtime, higher accuracy, and favorable semantic similarity scores. The key insight of this paper lies in the assessment of the relative performances of three prevalent state-of-the-art attack mechanisms.

In a model inversion (MI) attack, an adversary abuses access to a machine learning (ML) model to infer and reconstruct private training data. Remarkable progress has been made in the white-box and black-box setups, where the adversary has access to the complete model or the model's soft output respectively. However, there is very limited study in the most challenging but practically important setup: Label-only MI attacks, where the adversary only has access to the model's predicted label (hard label) without confidence scores nor any other model information. In this work, we propose LOKT, a novel approach for label-only MI attacks. Our idea is based on transfer of knowledge from the opaque target model to surrogate models. Subsequently, using these surrogate models, our approach can harness advanced white-box attacks. We propose knowledge transfer based on generative modelling, and introduce a new model, Target model-assisted ACGAN (T-ACGAN), for effective knowledge transfer. Our method casts the challenging label-only MI into the more tractable white-box setup. We provide analysis to support that surrogate models based on our approach serve as effective proxies for the target model for MI. Our experiments show that our method significantly outperforms existing SOTA Label-only MI attack by more than 15% across all MI benchmarks. Furthermore, our method compares favorably in terms of query budget. Our study highlights rising privacy threats for ML models even when minimal information (i.e., hard labels) is exposed. Our study highlights rising privacy threats for ML models even when minimal information (i.e., hard labels) is exposed. Our code, demo, models and reconstructed data are available at our project page: https://ngoc-nguyen-0.github.io/lokt/

Compositional reinforcement learning is a promising approach for training policies to perform complex long-horizon tasks. Typically, a high-level task is decomposed into a sequence of subtasks and a separate policy is trained to perform each subtask. In this paper, we focus on the problem of training subtask policies in a way that they can be used to perform any task; here, a task is given by a sequence of subtasks. We aim to maximize the worst-case performance over all tasks as opposed to the average-case performance. We formulate the problem as a two agent zero-sum game in which the adversary picks the sequence of subtasks. We propose two RL algorithms to solve this game: one is an adaptation of existing multi-agent RL algorithms to our setting and the other is an asynchronous version which enables parallel training of subtask policies. We evaluate our approach on two multi-task environments with continuous states and actions and demonstrate that our algorithms outperform state-of-the-art baselines.

In data poisoning attacks, an adversary tries to change a model's prediction by adding, modifying, or removing samples in the training data. Recently, ensemble-based approaches for obtaining provable defenses against data poisoning have been proposed where predictions are done by taking a majority vote across multiple base models. In this work, we show that merely considering the majority vote in ensemble defenses is wasteful as it does not effectively utilize available information in the logits layers of the base models. Instead, we propose Run-Off Election (ROE), a novel aggregation method based on a two-round election across the base models: In the first round, models vote for their preferred class and then a second, Run-Off election is held between the top two classes in the first round. Based on this approach, we propose DPA+ROE and FA+ROE defense methods based on Deep Partition Aggregation (DPA) and Finite Aggregation (FA) approaches from prior work. We evaluate our methods on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and GTSRB and obtain improvements in certified accuracy by up to 3%-4%. Also, by applying ROE on a boosted version of DPA, we gain improvements around 12%-27% comparing to the current state-of-the-art, establishing a new state-of-the-art in (pointwise) certified robustness against data poisoning. In many cases, our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art, even when using 32 times less computational power.

Many real-world data come in the form of graphs. Graph neural networks (GNNs), a new family of machine learning (ML) models, have been proposed to fully leverage graph data to build powerful applications. In particular, the inductive GNNs, which can generalize to unseen data, become mainstream in this direction. Machine learning models have shown great potential in various tasks and have been deployed in many real-world scenarios. To train a good model, a large amount of data as well as computational resources are needed, leading to valuable intellectual property. Previous research has shown that ML models are prone to model stealing attacks, which aim to steal the functionality of the target models. However, most of them focus on the models trained with images and texts. On the other hand, little attention has been paid to models trained with graph data, i.e., GNNs. In this paper, we fill the gap by proposing the first model stealing attacks against inductive GNNs. We systematically define the threat model and propose six attacks based on the adversary's background knowledge and the responses of the target models. Our evaluation on six benchmark datasets shows that the proposed model stealing attacks against GNNs achieve promising performance.

Recent advances in Vision Transformer (ViT) have demonstrated its impressive performance in image classification, which makes it a promising alternative to Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Unlike CNNs, ViT represents an input image as a sequence of image patches. The patch-based input image representation makes the following question interesting: How does ViT perform when individual input image patches are perturbed with natural corruptions or adversarial perturbations, compared to CNNs? In this work, we study the robustness of ViT to patch-wise perturbations. Surprisingly, we find that ViTs are more robust to naturally corrupted patches than CNNs, whereas they are more vulnerable to adversarial patches. Furthermore, we discover that the attention mechanism greatly affects the robustness of vision transformers. Specifically, the attention module can help improve the robustness of ViT by effectively ignoring natural corrupted patches. However, when ViTs are attacked by an adversary, the attention mechanism can be easily fooled to focus more on the adversarially perturbed patches and cause a mistake. Based on our analysis, we propose a simple temperature-scaling based method to improve the robustness of ViT against adversarial patches. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments are performed to support our findings, understanding, and improvement of ViT robustness to patch-wise perturbations across a set of transformer-based architectures.

The study of provable adversarial robustness for deep neural networks (DNNs) has mainly focused on static supervised learning tasks such as image classification. However, DNNs have been used extensively in real-world adaptive tasks such as reinforcement learning (RL), making such systems vulnerable to adversarial attacks as well. Prior works in provable robustness in RL seek to certify the behaviour of the victim policy at every time-step against a non-adaptive adversary using methods developed for the static setting. But in the real world, an RL adversary can infer the defense strategy used by the victim agent by observing the states, actions, etc., from previous time-steps and adapt itself to produce stronger attacks in future steps. We present an efficient procedure, designed specifically to defend against an adaptive RL adversary, that can directly certify the total reward without requiring the policy to be robust at each time-step. Our main theoretical contribution is to prove an adaptive version of the Neyman-Pearson Lemma -- a key lemma for smoothing-based certificates -- where the adversarial perturbation at a particular time can be a stochastic function of current and previous observations and states as well as previous actions. Building on this result, we propose policy smoothing where the agent adds a Gaussian noise to its observation at each time-step before passing it through the policy function. Our robustness certificates guarantee that the final total reward obtained by policy smoothing remains above a certain threshold, even though the actions at intermediate time-steps may change under the attack. Our experiments on various environments like Cartpole, Pong, Freeway and Mountain Car show that our method can yield meaningful robustness guarantees in practice.

Machine comprehension of texts longer than a single sentence often requires coreference resolution. However, most current reading comprehension benchmarks do not contain complex coreferential phenomena and hence fail to evaluate the ability of models to resolve coreference. We present a new crowdsourced dataset containing more than 24K span-selection questions that require resolving coreference among entities in over 4.7K English paragraphs from Wikipedia. Obtaining questions focused on such phenomena is challenging, because it is hard to avoid lexical cues that shortcut complex reasoning. We deal with this issue by using a strong baseline model as an adversary in the crowdsourcing loop, which helps crowdworkers avoid writing questions with exploitable surface cues. We show that state-of-the-art reading comprehension models perform significantly worse than humans on this benchmark---the best model performance is 70.5 F1, while the estimated human performance is 93.4 F1.

Recent progress in natural language generation has raised dual-use concerns. While applications like summarization and translation are positive, the underlying technology also might enable adversaries to generate neural fake news: targeted propaganda that closely mimics the style of real news. Modern computer security relies on careful threat modeling: identifying potential threats and vulnerabilities from an adversary's point of view, and exploring potential mitigations to these threats. Likewise, developing robust defenses against neural fake news requires us first to carefully investigate and characterize the risks of these models. We thus present a model for controllable text generation called Grover. Given a headline like `Link Found Between Vaccines and Autism,' Grover can generate the rest of the article; humans find these generations to be more trustworthy than human-written disinformation. Developing robust verification techniques against generators like Grover is critical. We find that best current discriminators can classify neural fake news from real, human-written, news with 73% accuracy, assuming access to a moderate level of training data. Counterintuitively, the best defense against Grover turns out to be Grover itself, with 92% accuracy, demonstrating the importance of public release of strong generators. We investigate these results further, showing that exposure bias -- and sampling strategies that alleviate its effects -- both leave artifacts that similar discriminators can pick up on. We conclude by discussing ethical issues regarding the technology, and plan to release Grover publicly, helping pave the way for better detection of neural fake news.

In this work, we provide a characterization of the feature-learning process in two-layer ReLU networks trained by gradient descent on the logistic loss following random initialization. We consider data with binary labels that are generated by an XOR-like function of the input features. We permit a constant fraction of the training labels to be corrupted by an adversary. We show that, although linear classifiers are no better than random guessing for the distribution we consider, two-layer ReLU networks trained by gradient descent achieve generalization error close to the label noise rate. We develop a novel proof technique that shows that at initialization, the vast majority of neurons function as random features that are only weakly correlated with useful features, and the gradient descent dynamics 'amplify' these weak, random features to strong, useful features.

Automatic LLM benchmarks, such as AlpacaEval 2.0, Arena-Hard-Auto, and MT-Bench, have become popular for evaluating language models due to their cost-effectiveness and scalability compared to human evaluation. Achieving high win rates on these benchmarks can significantly boost the promotional impact of newly released language models. This promotional benefit may motivate tricks, such as manipulating model output length or style to game win rates, even though several mechanisms have been developed to control length and disentangle style to reduce gameability. Nonetheless, we show that even a "null model" that always outputs a constant response (irrelevant to input instructions) can cheat automatic benchmarks and achieve top-ranked win rates: an 86.5% LC win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0; an 83.0 score on Arena-Hard-Auto; and a 9.55 score on MT-Bench. Moreover, the crafted cheating outputs are transferable because we assume that the instructions of these benchmarks (e.g., 805 samples of AlpacaEval 2.0) are private and cannot be accessed. While our experiments are primarily proof-of-concept, an adversary could use LLMs to generate more imperceptible cheating responses, unethically benefiting from high win rates and promotional impact. Our findings call for the development of anti-cheating mechanisms for reliable automatic benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/Cheating-LLM-Benchmarks.

Deploying Large language models (LLMs) can pose hazards from harmful outputs such as toxic or dishonest speech. Prior work has introduced tools that elicit harmful outputs in order to identify and mitigate these risks. While this is a valuable step toward securing language models, these approaches typically rely on a pre-existing classifier for undesired outputs. This limits their application to situations where the type of harmful behavior is known with precision beforehand. However, this skips a central challenge of red teaming: developing a contextual understanding of the behaviors that a model can exhibit. Furthermore, when such a classifier already exists, red teaming has limited marginal value because the classifier could simply be used to filter training data or model outputs. In this work, we consider red teaming under the assumption that the adversary is working from a high-level, abstract specification of undesired behavior. The red team is expected to refine/extend this specification and identify methods to elicit this behavior from the model. Our red teaming framework consists of three steps: 1) Exploring the model's behavior in the desired context; 2) Establishing a measurement of undesired behavior (e.g., a classifier trained to reflect human evaluations); and 3) Exploiting the model's flaws using this measure and an established red teaming methodology. We apply this approach to red team GPT-2 and GPT-3 models to systematically discover classes of prompts that elicit toxic and dishonest statements. In doing so, we also construct and release the CommonClaim dataset of 20,000 statements that have been labeled by human subjects as common-knowledge-true, common-knowledge-false, or neither. Code is available at https://github.com/thestephencasper/explore_establish_exploit_llms. CommonClaim is available at https://github.com/thestephencasper/common_claim.

Backdoor attacks are a kind of insidious security threat against machine learning models. After being injected with a backdoor in training, the victim model will produce adversary-specified outputs on the inputs embedded with predesigned triggers but behave properly on normal inputs during inference. As a sort of emergent attack, backdoor attacks in natural language processing (NLP) are investigated insufficiently. As far as we know, almost all existing textual backdoor attack methods insert additional contents into normal samples as triggers, which causes the trigger-embedded samples to be detected and the backdoor attacks to be blocked without much effort. In this paper, we propose to use the syntactic structure as the trigger in textual backdoor attacks. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that the syntactic trigger-based attack method can achieve comparable attack performance (almost 100% success rate) to the insertion-based methods but possesses much higher invisibility and stronger resistance to defenses. These results also reveal the significant insidiousness and harmfulness of textual backdoor attacks. All the code and data of this paper can be obtained at https://github.com/thunlp/HiddenKiller.

Contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) has been found to be vulnerable to poisoning backdoor attacks where the adversary can achieve an almost perfect attack success rate on CLIP models by poisoning only 0.01\% of the training dataset. This raises security concerns on the current practice of pretraining large-scale models on unscrutinized web data using CLIP. In this work, we analyze the representations of backdoor-poisoned samples learned by CLIP models and find that they exhibit unique characteristics in their local subspace, i.e., their local neighborhoods are far more sparse than that of clean samples. Based on this finding, we conduct a systematic study on detecting CLIP backdoor attacks and show that these attacks can be easily and efficiently detected by traditional density ratio-based local outlier detectors, whereas existing backdoor sample detection methods fail. Our experiments also reveal that an unintentional backdoor already exists in the original CC3M dataset and has been trained into a popular open-source model released by OpenCLIP. Based on our detector, one can clean up a million-scale web dataset (e.g., CC3M) efficiently within 15 minutes using 4 Nvidia A100 GPUs. The code is publicly available in our https://github.com/HanxunH/Detect-CLIP-Backdoor-Samples{GitHub repository}.

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS), known for its groundbreaking performance and efficiency, has become a dominant 3D representation and brought progress to many 3D vision tasks. However, in this work, we reveal a significant security vulnerability that has been largely overlooked in 3DGS: the computation cost of training 3DGS could be maliciously tampered by poisoning the input data. By developing an attack named Poison-splat, we reveal a novel attack surface where the adversary can poison the input images to drastically increase the computation memory and time needed for 3DGS training, pushing the algorithm towards its worst computation complexity. In extreme cases, the attack can even consume all allocable memory, leading to a Denial-of-Service (DoS) that disrupts servers, resulting in practical damages to real-world 3DGS service vendors. Such a computation cost attack is achieved by addressing a bi-level optimization problem through three tailored strategies: attack objective approximation, proxy model rendering, and optional constrained optimization. These strategies not only ensure the effectiveness of our attack but also make it difficult to defend with simple defensive measures. We hope the revelation of this novel attack surface can spark attention to this crucial yet overlooked vulnerability of 3DGS systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiahaolu97/poison-splat .

Modern neural networks are often trained on massive datasets that are web scraped with minimal human inspection. As a result of this insecure curation pipeline, an adversary can poison or backdoor the resulting model by uploading malicious data to the internet and waiting for a victim to scrape and train on it. Existing approaches for creating poisons and backdoors start with randomly sampled clean data, called base samples, and then modify those samples to craft poisons. However, some base samples may be significantly more amenable to poisoning than others. As a result, we may be able to craft more potent poisons by carefully choosing the base samples. In this work, we use guided diffusion to synthesize base samples from scratch that lead to significantly more potent poisons and backdoors than previous state-of-the-art attacks. Our Guided Diffusion Poisoning (GDP) base samples can be combined with any downstream poisoning or backdoor attack to boost its effectiveness. Our implementation code is publicly available at: https://github.com/hsouri/GDP .

Model extraction is a growing concern for the security of AI systems. For deep neural network models, the architecture is the most important information an adversary aims to recover. Being a sequence of repeated computation blocks, neural network models deployed on edge-devices will generate distinctive side-channel leakages. The latter can be exploited to extract critical information when targeted platforms are physically accessible. By combining theoretical knowledge about deep learning practices and analysis of a widespread implementation library (ARM CMSIS-NN), our purpose is to answer this critical question: how far can we extract architecture information by simply examining an EM side-channel trace? For the first time, we propose an extraction methodology for traditional MLP and CNN models running on a high-end 32-bit microcontroller (Cortex-M7) that relies only on simple pattern recognition analysis. Despite few challenging cases, we claim that, contrary to parameters extraction, the complexity of the attack is relatively low and we highlight the urgent need for practicable protections that could fit the strong memory and latency requirements of such platforms.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. The backdoor adversaries intend to maliciously control the predictions of attacked DNNs by injecting hidden backdoors that can be activated by adversary-specified trigger patterns during the training process. One recent research revealed that most of the existing attacks failed in the real physical world since the trigger contained in the digitized test samples may be different from that of the one used for training. Accordingly, users can adopt spatial transformations as the image pre-processing to deactivate hidden backdoors. In this paper, we explore the previous findings from another side. We exploit classical spatial transformations (i.e. rotation and translation) with the specific parameter as trigger patterns to design a simple yet effective poisoning-based backdoor attack. For example, only images rotated to a particular angle can activate the embedded backdoor of attacked DNNs. Extensive experiments are conducted, verifying the effectiveness of our attack under both digital and physical settings and its resistance to existing backdoor defenses.

Adversarial robustness has become a central goal in deep learning, both in the theory and the practice. However, successful methods to improve the adversarial robustness (such as adversarial training) greatly hurt generalization performance on the unperturbed data. This could have a major impact on how the adversarial robustness affects real world systems (i.e. many may opt to forego robustness if it can improve accuracy on the unperturbed data). We propose Interpolated Adversarial Training, which employs recently proposed interpolation based training methods in the framework of adversarial training. On CIFAR-10, adversarial training increases the standard test error (when there is no adversary) from 4.43% to 12.32%, whereas with our Interpolated adversarial training we retain the adversarial robustness while achieving a standard test error of only 6.45%. With our technique, the relative increase in the standard error for the robust model is reduced from 178.1% to just 45.5%. Moreover, we provide mathematical analysis of Interpolated Adversarial Training to confirm its efficiencies and demonstrate its advantages in terms of robustness and generalization.

Large language models are pre-trained on uncurated text datasets consisting of trillions of tokens scraped from the Web. Prior work has shown that: (1) web-scraped pre-training datasets can be practically poisoned by malicious actors; and (2) adversaries can compromise language models after poisoning fine-tuning datasets. Our work evaluates for the first time whether language models can also be compromised during pre-training, with a focus on the persistence of pre-training attacks after models are fine-tuned as helpful and harmless chatbots (i.e., after SFT and DPO). We pre-train a series of LLMs from scratch to measure the impact of a potential poisoning adversary under four different attack objectives (denial-of-service, belief manipulation, jailbreaking, and prompt stealing), and across a wide range of model sizes (from 600M to 7B). Our main result is that poisoning only 0.1% of a model's pre-training dataset is sufficient for three out of four attacks to measurably persist through post-training. Moreover, simple attacks like denial-of-service persist through post-training with a poisoning rate of only 0.001%.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) expands the capabilities of modern large language models (LLMs) in chatbot applications, enabling developers to adapt and personalize the LLM output without expensive training or fine-tuning. RAG systems use an external knowledge database to retrieve the most relevant documents for a given query, providing this context to the LLM generator. While RAG achieves impressive utility in many applications, its adoption to enable personalized generative models introduces new security risks. In this work, we propose new attack surfaces for an adversary to compromise a victim's RAG system, by injecting a single malicious document in its knowledge database. We design Phantom, general two-step attack framework against RAG augmented LLMs. The first step involves crafting a poisoned document designed to be retrieved by the RAG system within the top-k results only when an adversarial trigger, a specific sequence of words acting as backdoor, is present in the victim's queries. In the second step, a specially crafted adversarial string within the poisoned document triggers various adversarial attacks in the LLM generator, including denial of service, reputation damage, privacy violations, and harmful behaviors. We demonstrate our attacks on multiple LLM architectures, including Gemma, Vicuna, and Llama.

Large language models (LLMs) are typically aligned to be harmless to humans. Unfortunately, recent work has shown that such models are susceptible to automated jailbreak attacks that induce them to generate harmful content. More recent LLMs often incorporate an additional layer of defense, a Guard Model, which is a second LLM that is designed to check and moderate the output response of the primary LLM. Our key contribution is to show a novel attack strategy, PRP, that is successful against several open-source (e.g., Llama 2) and closed-source (e.g., GPT 3.5) implementations of Guard Models. PRP leverages a two step prefix-based attack that operates by (a) constructing a universal adversarial prefix for the Guard Model, and (b) propagating this prefix to the response. We find that this procedure is effective across multiple threat models, including ones in which the adversary has no access to the Guard Model at all. Our work suggests that further advances are required on defenses and Guard Models before they can be considered effective.

Adversarial attacks have been a looming and unaddressed threat in the industry. However, through a decade-long history of the robustness evaluation literature, we have learned that mounting a strong or optimal attack is challenging. It requires both machine learning and domain expertise. In other words, the white-box threat model, religiously assumed by a large majority of the past literature, is unrealistic. In this paper, we propose a new practical threat model where the adversary relies on transfer attacks through publicly available surrogate models. We argue that this setting will become the most prevalent for security-sensitive applications in the future. We evaluate the transfer attacks in this setting and propose a specialized defense method based on a game-theoretic perspective. The defenses are evaluated under 24 public models and 11 attack algorithms across three datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet). Under this threat model, our defense, PubDef, outperforms the state-of-the-art white-box adversarial training by a large margin with almost no loss in the normal accuracy. For instance, on ImageNet, our defense achieves 62% accuracy under the strongest transfer attack vs only 36% of the best adversarially trained model. Its accuracy when not under attack is only 2% lower than that of an undefended model (78% vs 80%). We release our code at https://github.com/wagner-group/pubdef.

The bulk of existing research in defending against adversarial examples focuses on defending against a single (typically bounded Lp-norm) attack, but for a practical setting, machine learning (ML) models should be robust to a wide variety of attacks. In this paper, we present the first unified framework for considering multiple attacks against ML models. Our framework is able to model different levels of learner's knowledge about the test-time adversary, allowing us to model robustness against unforeseen attacks and robustness against unions of attacks. Using our framework, we present the first leaderboard, MultiRobustBench, for benchmarking multiattack evaluation which captures performance across attack types and attack strengths. We evaluate the performance of 16 defended models for robustness against a set of 9 different attack types, including Lp-based threat models, spatial transformations, and color changes, at 20 different attack strengths (180 attacks total). Additionally, we analyze the state of current defenses against multiple attacks. Our analysis shows that while existing defenses have made progress in terms of average robustness across the set of attacks used, robustness against the worst-case attack is still a big open problem as all existing models perform worse than random guessing.

Vertical federated learning is a trending solution for multi-party collaboration in training machine learning models. Industrial frameworks adopt secure multi-party computation methods such as homomorphic encryption to guarantee data security and privacy. However, a line of work has revealed that there are still leakage risks in VFL. The leakage is caused by the correlation between the intermediate representations and the raw data. Due to the powerful approximation ability of deep neural networks, an adversary can capture the correlation precisely and reconstruct the data. To deal with the threat of the data reconstruction attack, we propose a hashing-based VFL framework, called HashVFL, to cut off the reversibility directly. The one-way nature of hashing allows our framework to block all attempts to recover data from hash codes. However, integrating hashing also brings some challenges, e.g., the loss of information. This paper proposes and addresses three challenges to integrating hashing: learnability, bit balance, and consistency. Experimental results demonstrate HashVFL's efficiency in keeping the main task's performance and defending against data reconstruction attacks. Furthermore, we also analyze its potential value in detecting abnormal inputs. In addition, we conduct extensive experiments to prove HashVFL's generalization in various settings. In summary, HashVFL provides a new perspective on protecting multi-party's data security and privacy in VFL. We hope our study can attract more researchers to expand the application domains of HashVFL.

Semi-supervised machine learning (SSL) is gaining popularity as it reduces the cost of training ML models. It does so by using very small amounts of (expensive, well-inspected) labeled data and large amounts of (cheap, non-inspected) unlabeled data. SSL has shown comparable or even superior performances compared to conventional fully-supervised ML techniques. In this paper, we show that the key feature of SSL that it can learn from (non-inspected) unlabeled data exposes SSL to strong poisoning attacks. In fact, we argue that, due to its reliance on non-inspected unlabeled data, poisoning is a much more severe problem in SSL than in conventional fully-supervised ML. Specifically, we design a backdoor poisoning attack on SSL that can be conducted by a weak adversary with no knowledge of target SSL pipeline. This is unlike prior poisoning attacks in fully-supervised settings that assume strong adversaries with practically-unrealistic capabilities. We show that by poisoning only 0.2% of the unlabeled training data, our attack can cause misclassification of more than 80% of test inputs (when they contain the adversary's backdoor trigger). Our attacks remain effective across twenty combinations of benchmark datasets and SSL algorithms, and even circumvent the state-of-the-art defenses against backdoor attacks. Our work raises significant concerns about the practical utility of existing SSL algorithms.

Differential privacy (DP) is by far the most widely accepted framework for mitigating privacy risks in machine learning. However, exactly how small the privacy parameter epsilon needs to be to protect against certain privacy risks in practice is still not well-understood. In this work, we study data reconstruction attacks for discrete data and analyze it under the framework of multiple hypothesis testing. We utilize different variants of the celebrated Fano's inequality to derive upper bounds on the inferential power of a data reconstruction adversary when the model is trained differentially privately. Importantly, we show that if the underlying private data takes values from a set of size M, then the target privacy parameter epsilon can be O(log M) before the adversary gains significant inferential power. Our analysis offers theoretical evidence for the empirical effectiveness of DP against data reconstruction attacks even at relatively large values of epsilon.

We introduce a new approach to image forensics: placing physical refractive objects, which we call totems, into a scene so as to protect any photograph taken of that scene. Totems bend and redirect light rays, thus providing multiple, albeit distorted, views of the scene within a single image. A defender can use these distorted totem pixels to detect if an image has been manipulated. Our approach unscrambles the light rays passing through the totems by estimating their positions in the scene and using their known geometric and material properties. To verify a totem-protected image, we detect inconsistencies between the scene reconstructed from totem viewpoints and the scene's appearance from the camera viewpoint. Such an approach makes the adversarial manipulation task more difficult, as the adversary must modify both the totem and image pixels in a geometrically consistent manner without knowing the physical properties of the totem. Unlike prior learning-based approaches, our method does not require training on datasets of specific manipulations, and instead uses physical properties of the scene and camera to solve the forensics problem.

Stealthy hardware Trojans (HTs) inserted during the fabrication of integrated circuits can bypass the security of critical infrastructures. Although researchers have proposed many techniques to detect HTs, several limitations exist, including: (i) a low success rate, (ii) high algorithmic complexity, and (iii) a large number of test patterns. Furthermore, the most pertinent drawback of prior detection techniques stems from an incorrect evaluation methodology, i.e., they assume that an adversary inserts HTs randomly. Such inappropriate adversarial assumptions enable detection techniques to claim high HT detection accuracy, leading to a "false sense of security." Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, despite more than a decade of research on detecting HTs inserted during fabrication, there have been no concerted efforts to perform a systematic evaluation of HT detection techniques. In this paper, we play the role of a realistic adversary and question the efficacy of HT detection techniques by developing an automated, scalable, and practical attack framework, ATTRITION, using reinforcement learning (RL). ATTRITION evades eight detection techniques across two HT detection categories, showcasing its agnostic behavior. ATTRITION achieves average attack success rates of 47times and 211times compared to randomly inserted HTs against state-of-the-art HT detection techniques. We demonstrate ATTRITION's ability to evade detection techniques by evaluating designs ranging from the widely-used academic suites to larger designs such as the open-source MIPS and mor1kx processors to AES and a GPS module. Additionally, we showcase the impact of ATTRITION-generated HTs through two case studies (privilege escalation and kill switch) on the mor1kx processor. We envision that our work, along with our released HT benchmarks and models, fosters the development of better HT detection techniques.

In the future, powerful AI systems may be deployed in high-stakes settings, where a single failure could be catastrophic. One technique for improving AI safety in high-stakes settings is adversarial training, which uses an adversary to generate examples to train on in order to achieve better worst-case performance. In this work, we used a safe language generation task (``avoid injuries'') as a testbed for achieving high reliability through adversarial training. We created a series of adversarial training techniques -- including a tool that assists human adversaries -- to find and eliminate failures in a classifier that filters text completions suggested by a generator. In our task, we determined that we can set very conservative classifier thresholds without significantly impacting the quality of the filtered outputs. We found that adversarial training increased robustness to the adversarial attacks that we trained on -- doubling the time for our contractors to find adversarial examples both with our tool (from 13 to 26 minutes) and without (from 20 to 44 minutes) -- without affecting in-distribution performance. We hope to see further work in the high-stakes reliability setting, including more powerful tools for enhancing human adversaries and better ways to measure high levels of reliability, until we can confidently rule out the possibility of catastrophic deployment-time failures of powerful models.

Large speech emotion recognition datasets are hard to obtain, and small datasets may contain biases. Deep-net-based classifiers, in turn, are prone to exploit those biases and find shortcuts such as speaker characteristics. These shortcuts usually harm a model's ability to generalize. To address this challenge, we propose a gradient-based adversary learning framework that learns a speech emotion recognition task while normalizing speaker characteristics from the feature representation. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on both speaker-independent and speaker-dependent settings and obtain new state-of-the-art results on the challenging IEMOCAP dataset.

Visual object tracking (VOT) has been widely adopted in mission-critical applications, such as autonomous driving and intelligent surveillance systems. In current practice, third-party resources such as datasets, backbone networks, and training platforms are frequently used to train high-performance VOT models. Whilst these resources bring certain convenience, they also introduce new security threats into VOT models. In this paper, we reveal such a threat where an adversary can easily implant hidden backdoors into VOT models by tempering with the training process. Specifically, we propose a simple yet effective few-shot backdoor attack (FSBA) that optimizes two losses alternately: 1) a feature loss defined in the hidden feature space, and 2) the standard tracking loss. We show that, once the backdoor is embedded into the target model by our FSBA, it can trick the model to lose track of specific objects even when the trigger only appears in one or a few frames. We examine our attack in both digital and physical-world settings and show that it can significantly degrade the performance of state-of-the-art VOT trackers. We also show that our attack is resistant to potential defenses, highlighting the vulnerability of VOT models to potential backdoor attacks.

To achieve reliable, robust, and safe AI systems, it is vital to implement fallback strategies when AI predictions cannot be trusted. Certifiers for neural networks are a reliable way to check the robustness of these predictions. They guarantee for some predictions that a certain class of manipulations or attacks could not have changed the outcome. For the remaining predictions without guarantees, the method abstains from making a prediction, and a fallback strategy needs to be invoked, which typically incurs additional costs, can require a human operator, or even fail to provide any prediction. While this is a key concept towards safe and secure AI, we show for the first time that this approach comes with its own security risks, as such fallback strategies can be deliberately triggered by an adversary. In addition to naturally occurring abstains for some inputs and perturbations, the adversary can use training-time attacks to deliberately trigger the fallback with high probability. This transfers the main system load onto the fallback, reducing the overall system's integrity and/or availability. We design two novel availability attacks, which show the practical relevance of these threats. For example, adding 1% poisoned data during training is sufficient to trigger the fallback and hence make the model unavailable for up to 100% of all inputs by inserting the trigger. Our extensive experiments across multiple datasets, model architectures, and certifiers demonstrate the broad applicability of these attacks. An initial investigation into potential defenses shows that current approaches are insufficient to mitigate the issue, highlighting the need for new, specific solutions.

Federated Learning (FL) systems are gaining popularity as a solution to training Machine Learning (ML) models from large-scale user data collected on personal devices (e.g., smartphones) without their raw data leaving the device. At the core of FL is a network of anonymous user devices sharing training information (model parameter updates) computed locally on personal data. However, the type and degree to which user-specific information is encoded in the model updates is poorly understood. In this paper, we identify model updates encode subtle variations in which users capture and generate data. The variations provide a strong statistical signal, allowing an adversary to effectively deanonymize participating devices using a limited set of auxiliary data. We analyze resulting deanonymization attacks on diverse tasks on real-world (anonymized) user-generated data across a range of closed- and open-world scenarios. We study various strategies to mitigate the risks of deanonymization. As random perturbation methods do not offer convincing operating points, we propose data-augmentation strategies which introduces adversarial biases in device data and thereby, offer substantial protection against deanonymization threats with little effect on utility.

Motivated by ethical and legal concerns, the scientific community is actively developing methods to limit the misuse of Text-to-Image diffusion models for reproducing copyrighted, violent, explicit, or personal information in the generated images. Simultaneously, researchers put these newly developed safety measures to the test by assuming the role of an adversary to find vulnerabilities and backdoors in them. We use compositional property of diffusion models, which allows to leverage multiple prompts in a single image generation. This property allows us to combine other concepts, that should not have been affected by the inhibition, to reconstruct the vector, responsible for target concept generation, even though the direct computation of this vector is no longer accessible. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence why the proposed attacks are possible and discuss the implications of these findings for safe model deployment. We argue that it is essential to consider all possible approaches to image generation with diffusion models that can be employed by an adversary. Our work opens up the discussion about the implications of concept arithmetics and compositional inference for safety mechanisms in diffusion models. Content Advisory: This paper contains discussions and model-generated content that may be considered offensive. Reader discretion is advised. Project page: https://cs-people.bu.edu/vpetsiuk/arc

Projection maintenance is one of the core data structure tasks. Efficient data structures for projection maintenance have led to recent breakthroughs in many convex programming algorithms. In this work, we further extend this framework to the Kronecker product structure. Given a constraint matrix {sf A} and a positive semi-definite matrix Win R^{ntimes n} with a sparse eigenbasis, we consider the task of maintaining the projection in the form of {sf B}^top({sf B}{sf B}^top)^{-1}{sf B}, where {sf B}={sf A}(Wotimes I) or {sf B}={sf A}(W^{1/2}otimes W^{1/2}). At each iteration, the weight matrix W receives a low rank change and we receive a new vector h. The goal is to maintain the projection matrix and answer the query {sf B}^top({sf B}{sf B}^top)^{-1}{sf B}h with good approximation guarantees. We design a fast dynamic data structure for this task and it is robust against an adaptive adversary. Following the beautiful and pioneering work of [Beimel, Kaplan, Mansour, Nissim, Saranurak and Stemmer, STOC'22], we use tools from differential privacy to reduce the randomness required by the data structure and further improve the running time.

It has been well recognized that neural network based image classifiers are easily fooled by images with tiny perturbations crafted by an adversary. There has been a vast volume of research to generate and defend such adversarial attacks. However, the following problem is left unexplored: How to reverse-engineer adversarial perturbations from an adversarial image? This leads to a new adversarial learning paradigm--Reverse Engineering of Deceptions (RED). If successful, RED allows us to estimate adversarial perturbations and recover the original images. However, carefully crafted, tiny adversarial perturbations are difficult to recover by optimizing a unilateral RED objective. For example, the pure image denoising method may overfit to minimizing the reconstruction error but hardly preserve the classification properties of the true adversarial perturbations. To tackle this challenge, we formalize the RED problem and identify a set of principles crucial to the RED approach design. Particularly, we find that prediction alignment and proper data augmentation (in terms of spatial transformations) are two criteria to achieve a generalizable RED approach. By integrating these RED principles with image denoising, we propose a new Class-Discriminative Denoising based RED framework, termed CDD-RED. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CDD-RED under different evaluation metrics (ranging from the pixel-level, prediction-level to the attribution-level alignment) and a variety of attack generation methods (e.g., FGSM, PGD, CW, AutoAttack, and adaptive attacks).

Mammalian brains handle complex reasoning tasks in a gestalt manner by integrating information from regions of the brain that are specialised to individual sensory modalities. This allows for improved robustness and better generalisation ability. In contrast, deep neural networks are usually designed to process one particular information stream and susceptible to various types of adversarial perturbations. While many methods exist for detecting and defending against adversarial attacks, they do not generalise across a range of attacks and negatively affect performance on clean, unperturbed data. We developed a fusion model using a combination of background and foreground features extracted in parallel from Places-CNN and Imagenet-CNN. We tested the benefits of the fusion approach on preserving adversarial robustness for human perceivable (e.g., Gaussian blur) and network perceivable (e.g., gradient-based) attacks for CIFAR-10 and MS COCO data sets. For gradient based attacks, our results show that fusion allows for significant improvements in classification without decreasing performance on unperturbed data and without need to perform adversarial retraining. Our fused model revealed improvements for Gaussian blur type perturbations as well. The increase in performance from fusion approach depended on the variability of the image contexts; larger increases were seen for classes of images with larger differences in their contexts. We also demonstrate the effect of regularization to bias the classifier decision in the presence of a known adversary. We propose that this biologically inspired approach to integrate information across multiple modalities provides a new way to improve adversarial robustness that can be complementary to current state of the art approaches.

Authorship obfuscation aims to disguise the identity of an author within a text by altering the writing style, vocabulary, syntax, and other linguistic features associated with the text author. This alteration needs to balance privacy and utility. While strong obfuscation techniques can effectively hide the author's identity, they often degrade the quality and usefulness of the text for its intended purpose. Conversely, maintaining high utility tends to provide insufficient privacy, making it easier for an adversary to de-anonymize the author. Thus, achieving an optimal trade-off between these two conflicting objectives is crucial. In this paper, we propose TAROT: Task-Oriented Authorship Obfuscation Using Policy Optimization, a new unsupervised authorship obfuscation method whose goal is to optimize the privacy-utility trade-off by regenerating the entire text considering its downstream utility. Our approach leverages policy optimization as a fine-tuning paradigm over small language models in order to rewrite texts by preserving author identity and downstream task utility. We show that our approach largely reduce the accuracy of attackers while preserving utility. We make our code and models publicly available.

In this paper we show how tensor networks help in developing explainability of machine learning algorithms. Specifically, we develop an unsupervised clustering algorithm based on Matrix Product States (MPS) and apply it in the context of a real use-case of adversary-generated threat intelligence. Our investigation proves that MPS rival traditional deep learning models such as autoencoders and GANs in terms of performance, while providing much richer model interpretability. Our approach naturally facilitates the extraction of feature-wise probabilities, Von Neumann Entropy, and mutual information, offering a compelling narrative for classification of anomalies and fostering an unprecedented level of transparency and interpretability, something fundamental to understand the rationale behind artificial intelligence decisions.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are deployed and integrated into thousands of applications, the need for scalable evaluation of how models respond to adversarial attacks grows rapidly. However, LLM security is a moving target: models produce unpredictable output, are constantly updated, and the potential adversary is highly diverse: anyone with access to the internet and a decent command of natural language. Further, what constitutes a security weak in one context may not be an issue in a different context; one-fits-all guardrails remain theoretical. In this paper, we argue that it is time to rethink what constitutes ``LLM security'', and pursue a holistic approach to LLM security evaluation, where exploration and discovery of issues are central. To this end, this paper introduces garak (Generative AI Red-teaming and Assessment Kit), a framework which can be used to discover and identify vulnerabilities in a target LLM or dialog system. garak probes an LLM in a structured fashion to discover potential vulnerabilities. The outputs of the framework describe a target model's weaknesses, contribute to an informed discussion of what composes vulnerabilities in unique contexts, and can inform alignment and policy discussions for LLM deployment.

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly enhanced the ability to effectively tackle various downstream NLP tasks and unify these tasks into generative pipelines. On the one hand, powerful language models, trained on massive textual data, have brought unparalleled accessibility and usability for both models and users. On the other hand, unrestricted access to these models can also introduce potential malicious and unintentional privacy risks. Despite ongoing efforts to address the safety and privacy concerns associated with LLMs, the problem remains unresolved. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the current privacy attacks targeting LLMs and categorize them according to the adversary's assumed capabilities to shed light on the potential vulnerabilities present in LLMs. Then, we present a detailed overview of prominent defense strategies that have been developed to counter these privacy attacks. Beyond existing works, we identify upcoming privacy concerns as LLMs evolve. Lastly, we point out several potential avenues for future exploration.

With the maturity of depth sensors, the vulnerability of 3D point cloud models has received increasing attention in various applications such as autonomous driving and robot navigation. Previous 3D adversarial attackers either follow the white-box setting to iteratively update the coordinate perturbations based on gradients, or utilize the output model logits to estimate noisy gradients in the black-box setting. However, these attack methods are hard to be deployed in real-world scenarios since realistic 3D applications will not share any model details to users. Therefore, we explore a more challenging yet practical 3D attack setting, i.e., attacking point clouds with black-box hard labels, in which the attacker can only have access to the prediction label of the input. To tackle this setting, we propose a novel 3D attack method, termed 3D Hard-label attacker (3DHacker), based on the developed decision boundary algorithm to generate adversarial samples solely with the knowledge of class labels. Specifically, to construct the class-aware model decision boundary, 3DHacker first randomly fuses two point clouds of different classes in the spectral domain to craft their intermediate sample with high imperceptibility, then projects it onto the decision boundary via binary search. To restrict the final perturbation size, 3DHacker further introduces an iterative optimization strategy to move the intermediate sample along the decision boundary for generating adversarial point clouds with smallest trivial perturbations. Extensive evaluations show that, even in the challenging hard-label setting, 3DHacker still competitively outperforms existing 3D attacks regarding the attack performance as well as adversary quality.

Deep learning models are susceptible to adversarial samples in white and black-box environments. Although previous studies have shown high attack success rates, coupling DNN models with interpretation models could offer a sense of security when a human expert is involved, who can identify whether a given sample is benign or malicious. However, in white-box environments, interpretable deep learning systems (IDLSes) have been shown to be vulnerable to malicious manipulations. In black-box settings, as access to the components of IDLSes is limited, it becomes more challenging for the adversary to fool the system. In this work, we propose a Query-efficient Score-based black-box attack against IDLSes, QuScore, which requires no knowledge of the target model and its coupled interpretation model. QuScore is based on transfer-based and score-based methods by employing an effective microbial genetic algorithm. Our method is designed to reduce the number of queries necessary to carry out successful attacks, resulting in a more efficient process. By continuously refining the adversarial samples created based on feedback scores from the IDLS, our approach effectively navigates the search space to identify perturbations that can fool the system. We evaluate the attack's effectiveness on four CNN models (Inception, ResNet, VGG, DenseNet) and two interpretation models (CAM, Grad), using both ImageNet and CIFAR datasets. Our results show that the proposed approach is query-efficient with a high attack success rate that can reach between 95% and 100% and transferability with an average success rate of 69% in the ImageNet and CIFAR datasets. Our attack method generates adversarial examples with attribution maps that resemble benign samples. We have also demonstrated that our attack is resilient against various preprocessing defense techniques and can easily be transferred to different DNN models.

While prior research has proposed a plethora of methods that build neural classifiers robust against adversarial robustness, practitioners are still reluctant to adopt them due to their unacceptably severe clean accuracy penalties. This paper significantly alleviates this accuracy-robustness trade-off by mixing the output probabilities of a standard classifier and a robust classifier, where the standard network is optimized for clean accuracy and is not robust in general. We show that the robust base classifier's confidence difference for correct and incorrect examples is the key to this improvement. In addition to providing intuitions and empirical evidence, we theoretically certify the robustness of the mixed classifier under realistic assumptions. Furthermore, we adapt an adversarial input detector into a mixing network that adaptively adjusts the mixture of the two base models, further reducing the accuracy penalty of achieving robustness. The proposed flexible method, termed "adaptive smoothing", can work in conjunction with existing or even future methods that improve clean accuracy, robustness, or adversary detection. Our empirical evaluation considers strong attack methods, including AutoAttack and adaptive attack. On the CIFAR-100 dataset, our method achieves an 85.21% clean accuracy while maintaining a 38.72% ell_infty-AutoAttacked (epsilon = 8/255) accuracy, becoming the second most robust method on the RobustBench CIFAR-100 benchmark as of submission, while improving the clean accuracy by ten percentage points compared with all listed models. The code that implements our method is available at https://github.com/Bai-YT/AdaptiveSmoothing.

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides across various tasks, but they remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where specific triggers in the prompt cause the LLM to generate adversary-desired responses. While most backdoor research has focused on vision or text classification tasks, backdoor attacks in text generation have been largely overlooked. In this work, we introduce BackdoorLLM, the first comprehensive benchmark for studying backdoor attacks on LLMs. BackdoorLLM features: 1) a repository of backdoor benchmarks with a standardized training pipeline, 2) diverse attack strategies, including data poisoning, weight poisoning, hidden state attacks, and chain-of-thought attacks, 3) extensive evaluations with over 200 experiments on 8 attacks across 7 scenarios and 6 model architectures, and 4) key insights into the effectiveness and limitations of backdoors in LLMs. We hope BackdoorLLM will raise awareness of backdoor threats and contribute to advancing AI safety. The code is available at https://github.com/bboylyg/BackdoorLLM.

We introduce a new method for extracting structured threat behaviors from threat intelligence text. Our method is based on a multi-stage ranking architecture that allows jointly optimizing for efficiency and effectiveness. Therefore, we believe this problem formulation better aligns with the real-world nature of the task considering the large number of adversary techniques and the extensive body of threat intelligence created by security analysts. Our findings show that the proposed system yields state-of-the-art performance results for this task. Results show that our method has a top-3 recall performance of 81\% in identifying the relevant technique among 193 top-level techniques. Our tests also demonstrate that our system performs significantly better (+40\%) than the widely used large language models when tested under a zero-shot setting.

In this paper we undertake a systematic study of privacy attacks against open source Large Language Models (LLMs), where an adversary has access to either the model weights, gradients, or losses, and tries to exploit them to learn something about the underlying training data. Our headline results are the first membership inference attacks (MIAs) against pre-trained LLMs that are able to simultaneously achieve high TPRs and low FPRs, and a pipeline showing that over 50% (!) of the fine-tuning dataset can be extracted from a fine-tuned LLM in natural settings. We consider varying degrees of access to the underlying model, customization of the language model, and resources available to the attacker. In the pre-trained setting, we propose three new white-box MIAs: an attack based on the gradient norm, a supervised neural network classifier, and a single step loss ratio attack. All outperform existing black-box baselines, and our supervised attack closes the gap between MIA attack success against LLMs and other types of models. In fine-tuning, we find that given access to the loss of the fine-tuned and base models, a fine-tuned loss ratio attack FLoRA is able to achieve near perfect MIA peformance. We then leverage these MIAs to extract fine-tuning data from fine-tuned language models. We find that the pipeline of generating from fine-tuned models prompted with a small snippet of the prefix of each training example, followed by using FLoRa to select the most likely training sample, succeeds the majority of the fine-tuning dataset after only 3 epochs of fine-tuning. Taken together, these findings show that highly effective MIAs are available in almost all LLM training settings, and highlight that great care must be taken before LLMs are fine-tuned on highly sensitive data and then deployed.

Watermarking of language model outputs enables statistical detection of model-generated text, which has many applications in the responsible deployment of language models. Existing watermarking strategies operate by altering the decoder of an existing language model, and the ability for a language model to directly learn to generate the watermark would have significant implications for the real-world deployment of watermarks. First, learned watermarks could be used to build open models that naturally generate watermarked text, allowing for open models to benefit from watermarking. Second, if watermarking is used to determine the provenance of generated text, an adversary can hurt the reputation of a victim model by spoofing its watermark and generating damaging watermarked text. To investigate the learnability of watermarks, we propose watermark distillation, which trains a student model to behave like a teacher model that uses decoding-based watermarking. We test our approach on three distinct decoding-based watermarking strategies and various hyperparameter settings, finding that models can learn to generate watermarked text with high detectability. We also find limitations to learnability, including the loss of watermarking capabilities under fine-tuning on normal text and high sample complexity when learning low-distortion watermarks.

Robustness against adversarial attacks and distribution shifts is a long-standing goal of Reinforcement Learning (RL). To this end, Robust Adversarial Reinforcement Learning (RARL) trains a protagonist against destabilizing forces exercised by an adversary in a competitive zero-sum Markov game, whose optimal solution, i.e., rational strategy, corresponds to a Nash equilibrium. However, finding Nash equilibria requires facing complex saddle point optimization problems, which can be prohibitive to solve, especially for high-dimensional control. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for adversarial RL based on entropy regularization to ease the complexity of the saddle point optimization problem. We show that the solution of this entropy-regularized problem corresponds to a Quantal Response Equilibrium (QRE), a generalization of Nash equilibria that accounts for bounded rationality, i.e., agents sometimes play random actions instead of optimal ones. Crucially, the connection between the entropy-regularized objective and QRE enables free modulation of the rationality of the agents by simply tuning the temperature coefficient. We leverage this insight to propose our novel algorithm, Quantal Adversarial RL (QARL), which gradually increases the rationality of the adversary in a curriculum fashion until it is fully rational, easing the complexity of the optimization problem while retaining robustness. We provide extensive evidence of QARL outperforming RARL and recent baselines across several MuJoCo locomotion and navigation problems in overall performance and robustness.

Despite efforts to align large language models (LLMs) with human values, widely-used LLMs such as GPT, Llama, Claude, and PaLM are susceptible to jailbreaking attacks, wherein an adversary fools a targeted LLM into generating objectionable content. To address this vulnerability, we propose SmoothLLM, the first algorithm designed to mitigate jailbreaking attacks on LLMs. Based on our finding that adversarially-generated prompts are brittle to character-level changes, our defense first randomly perturbs multiple copies of a given input prompt, and then aggregates the corresponding predictions to detect adversarial inputs. SmoothLLM reduces the attack success rate on numerous popular LLMs to below one percentage point, avoids unnecessary conservatism, and admits provable guarantees on attack mitigation. Moreover, our defense uses exponentially fewer queries than existing attacks and is compatible with any LLM. Our code is publicly available at the following link: https://github.com/arobey1/smooth-llm.

While numerous defense methods have been proposed to prohibit potential poisoning attacks from untrusted data sources, most research works only defend against specific attacks, which leaves many avenues for an adversary to exploit. In this work, we propose an efficient and robust training approach to defend against data poisoning attacks based on influence functions, named Healthy Influential-Noise based Training. Using influence functions, we craft healthy noise that helps to harden the classification model against poisoning attacks without significantly affecting the generalization ability on test data. In addition, our method can perform effectively when only a subset of the training data is modified, instead of the current method of adding noise to all examples that has been used in several previous works. We conduct comprehensive evaluations over two image datasets with state-of-the-art poisoning attacks under different realistic attack scenarios. Our empirical results show that HINT can efficiently protect deep learning models against the effect of both untargeted and targeted poisoning attacks.

Most existing works focus on direct perturbations to the victim's state/action or the underlying transition dynamics to demonstrate the vulnerability of reinforcement learning agents to adversarial attacks. However, such direct manipulations may not be always realizable. In this paper, we consider a multi-agent setting where a well-trained victim agent nu is exploited by an attacker controlling another agent alpha with an adversarial policy. Previous models do not account for the possibility that the attacker may only have partial control over alpha or that the attack may produce easily detectable "abnormal" behaviors. Furthermore, there is a lack of provably efficient defenses against these adversarial policies. To address these limitations, we introduce a generalized attack framework that has the flexibility to model to what extent the adversary is able to control the agent, and allows the attacker to regulate the state distribution shift and produce stealthier adversarial policies. Moreover, we offer a provably efficient defense with polynomial convergence to the most robust victim policy through adversarial training with timescale separation. This stands in sharp contrast to supervised learning, where adversarial training typically provides only empirical defenses. Using the Robosumo competition experiments, we show that our generalized attack formulation results in much stealthier adversarial policies when maintaining the same winning rate as baselines. Additionally, our adversarial training approach yields stable learning dynamics and less exploitable victim policies.

State-of-the-art Text-to-Image models like Stable Diffusion and DALLEcdot2 are revolutionizing how people generate visual content. At the same time, society has serious concerns about how adversaries can exploit such models to generate unsafe images. In this work, we focus on demystifying the generation of unsafe images and hateful memes from Text-to-Image models. We first construct a typology of unsafe images consisting of five categories (sexually explicit, violent, disturbing, hateful, and political). Then, we assess the proportion of unsafe images generated by four advanced Text-to-Image models using four prompt datasets. We find that these models can generate a substantial percentage of unsafe images; across four models and four prompt datasets, 14.56% of all generated images are unsafe. When comparing the four models, we find different risk levels, with Stable Diffusion being the most prone to generating unsafe content (18.92% of all generated images are unsafe). Given Stable Diffusion's tendency to generate more unsafe content, we evaluate its potential to generate hateful meme variants if exploited by an adversary to attack a specific individual or community. We employ three image editing methods, DreamBooth, Textual Inversion, and SDEdit, which are supported by Stable Diffusion. Our evaluation result shows that 24% of the generated images using DreamBooth are hateful meme variants that present the features of the original hateful meme and the target individual/community; these generated images are comparable to hateful meme variants collected from the real world. Overall, our results demonstrate that the danger of large-scale generation of unsafe images is imminent. We discuss several mitigating measures, such as curating training data, regulating prompts, and implementing safety filters, and encourage better safeguard tools to be developed to prevent unsafe generation.

The decentralized and privacy-preserving nature of federated learning (FL) makes it vulnerable to backdoor attacks aiming to manipulate the behavior of the resulting model on specific adversary-chosen inputs. However, most existing defenses based on statistical differences take effect only against specific attacks, especially when the malicious gradients are similar to benign ones or the data are highly non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID). In this paper, we revisit the distance-based defense methods and discover that i) Euclidean distance becomes meaningless in high dimensions and ii) malicious gradients with diverse characteristics cannot be identified by a single metric. To this end, we present a simple yet effective defense strategy with multi-metrics and dynamic weighting to identify backdoors adaptively. Furthermore, our novel defense has no reliance on predefined assumptions over attack settings or data distributions and little impact on benign performance. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct comprehensive experiments on different datasets under various attack settings, where our method achieves the best defensive performance. For instance, we achieve the lowest backdoor accuracy of 3.06% under the difficult Edge-case PGD, showing significant superiority over previous defenses. The results also demonstrate that our method can be well-adapted to a wide range of non-IID degrees without sacrificing the benign performance.

This study probes the vulnerabilities of cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (c-MARL) under adversarial attacks, a critical determinant of c-MARL's worst-case performance prior to real-world implementation. Current observation-based attacks, constrained by white-box assumptions, overlook c-MARL's complex multi-agent interactions and cooperative objectives, resulting in impractical and limited attack capabilities. To address these shortcomes, we propose Adversarial Minority Influence (AMI), a practical and strong for c-MARL. AMI is a practical black-box attack and can be launched without knowing victim parameters. AMI is also strong by considering the complex multi-agent interaction and the cooperative goal of agents, enabling a single adversarial agent to unilaterally misleads majority victims to form targeted worst-case cooperation. This mirrors minority influence phenomena in social psychology. To achieve maximum deviation in victim policies under complex agent-wise interactions, our unilateral attack aims to characterize and maximize the impact of the adversary on the victims. This is achieved by adapting a unilateral agent-wise relation metric derived from mutual information, thereby mitigating the adverse effects of victim influence on the adversary. To lead the victims into a jointly detrimental scenario, our targeted attack deceives victims into a long-term, cooperatively harmful situation by guiding each victim towards a specific target, determined through a trial-and-error process executed by a reinforcement learning agent. Through AMI, we achieve the first successful attack against real-world robot swarms and effectively fool agents in simulated environments into collectively worst-case scenarios, including Starcraft II and Multi-agent Mujoco. The source code and demonstrations can be found at: https://github.com/DIG-Beihang/AMI.

A distribution inference attack aims to infer statistical properties of data used to train machine learning models. These attacks are sometimes surprisingly potent, but the factors that impact distribution inference risk are not well understood and demonstrated attacks often rely on strong and unrealistic assumptions such as full knowledge of training environments even in supposedly black-box threat scenarios. To improve understanding of distribution inference risks, we develop a new black-box attack that even outperforms the best known white-box attack in most settings. Using this new attack, we evaluate distribution inference risk while relaxing a variety of assumptions about the adversary's knowledge under black-box access, like known model architectures and label-only access. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of previously proposed defenses and introduce new defenses. We find that although noise-based defenses appear to be ineffective, a simple re-sampling defense can be highly effective. Code is available at https://github.com/iamgroot42/dissecting_distribution_inference

While text-to-image synthesis currently enjoys great popularity among researchers and the general public, the security of these models has been neglected so far. Many text-guided image generation models rely on pre-trained text encoders from external sources, and their users trust that the retrieved models will behave as promised. Unfortunately, this might not be the case. We introduce backdoor attacks against text-guided generative models and demonstrate that their text encoders pose a major tampering risk. Our attacks only slightly alter an encoder so that no suspicious model behavior is apparent for image generations with clean prompts. By then inserting a single character trigger into the prompt, e.g., a non-Latin character or emoji, the adversary can trigger the model to either generate images with pre-defined attributes or images following a hidden, potentially malicious description. We empirically demonstrate the high effectiveness of our attacks on Stable Diffusion and highlight that the injection process of a single backdoor takes less than two minutes. Besides phrasing our approach solely as an attack, it can also force an encoder to forget phrases related to certain concepts, such as nudity or violence, and help to make image generation safer.

As a new paradigm in machine learning, self-supervised learning (SSL) is capable of learning high-quality representations of complex data without relying on labels. In addition to eliminating the need for labeled data, research has found that SSL improves the adversarial robustness over supervised learning since lacking labels makes it more challenging for adversaries to manipulate model predictions. However, the extent to which this robustness superiority generalizes to other types of attacks remains an open question. We explore this question in the context of backdoor attacks. Specifically, we design and evaluate CTRL, an embarrassingly simple yet highly effective self-supervised backdoor attack. By only polluting a tiny fraction of training data (<= 1%) with indistinguishable poisoning samples, CTRL causes any trigger-embedded input to be misclassified to the adversary's designated class with a high probability (>= 99%) at inference time. Our findings suggest that SSL and supervised learning are comparably vulnerable to backdoor attacks. More importantly, through the lens of CTRL, we study the inherent vulnerability of SSL to backdoor attacks. With both empirical and analytical evidence, we reveal that the representation invariance property of SSL, which benefits adversarial robustness, may also be the very reason making \ssl highly susceptible to backdoor attacks. Our findings also imply that the existing defenses against supervised backdoor attacks are not easily retrofitted to the unique vulnerability of SSL.

Recently, the newly emerged multimodal models, which leverage both visual and linguistic modalities to train powerful encoders, have gained increasing attention. However, learning from a large-scale unlabeled dataset also exposes the model to the risk of potential poisoning attacks, whereby the adversary aims to perturb the model's training data to trigger malicious behaviors in it. In contrast to previous work, only poisoning visual modality, in this work, we take the first step to studying poisoning attacks against multimodal models in both visual and linguistic modalities. Specially, we focus on answering two questions: (1) Is the linguistic modality also vulnerable to poisoning attacks? and (2) Which modality is most vulnerable? To answer the two questions, we propose three types of poisoning attacks against multimodal models. Extensive evaluations on different datasets and model architectures show that all three attacks can achieve significant attack performance while maintaining model utility in both visual and linguistic modalities. Furthermore, we observe that the poisoning effect differs between different modalities. To mitigate the attacks, we propose both pre-training and post-training defenses. We empirically show that both defenses can significantly reduce the attack performance while preserving the model's utility.

Autonomous agents deployed in the real world need to be robust against adversarial attacks on sensory inputs. Robustifying agent policies requires anticipating the strongest attacks possible. We demonstrate that existing observation-space attacks on reinforcement learning agents have a common weakness: while effective, their lack of temporal consistency makes them detectable using automated means or human inspection. Detectability is undesirable to adversaries as it may trigger security escalations. We introduce perfect illusory attacks, a novel form of adversarial attack on sequential decision-makers that is both effective and provably statistically undetectable. We then propose the more versatile R-attacks, which result in observation transitions that are consistent with the state-transition function of the adversary-free environment and can be learned end-to-end. Compared to existing attacks, we empirically find R-attacks to be significantly harder to detect with automated methods, and a small study with human subjects suggests they are similarly harder to detect for humans. We propose that undetectability should be a central concern in the study of adversarial attacks on mixed-autonomy settings.

We consider the combinatorial bandits problem with semi-bandit feedback under finite sampling budget constraints, in which the learner can carry out its action only for a limited number of times specified by an overall budget. The action is to choose a set of arms, whereupon feedback for each arm in the chosen set is received. Unlike existing works, we study this problem in a non-stochastic setting with subset-dependent feedback, i.e., the semi-bandit feedback received could be generated by an oblivious adversary and also might depend on the chosen set of arms. In addition, we consider a general feedback scenario covering both the numerical-based as well as preference-based case and introduce a sound theoretical framework for this setting guaranteeing sensible notions of optimal arms, which a learner seeks to find. We suggest a generic algorithm suitable to cover the full spectrum of conceivable arm elimination strategies from aggressive to conservative. Theoretical questions about the sufficient and necessary budget of the algorithm to find the best arm are answered and complemented by deriving lower bounds for any learning algorithm for this problem scenario.

The remarkable predictive performance of deep neural networks (DNNs) has led to their adoption in service domains of unprecedented scale and scope. However, the widespread adoption and growing commercialization of DNNs have underscored the importance of intellectual property (IP) protection. Devising techniques to ensure IP protection has become necessary due to the increasing trend of outsourcing the DNN computations on the untrusted accelerators in cloud-based services. The design methodologies and hyper-parameters of DNNs are crucial information, and leaking them may cause massive economic loss to the organization. Furthermore, the knowledge of DNN's architecture can increase the success probability of an adversarial attack where an adversary perturbs the inputs and alter the prediction. In this work, we devise a two-stage attack methodology "DeepPeep" which exploits the distinctive characteristics of design methodologies to reverse-engineer the architecture of building blocks in compact DNNs. We show the efficacy of "DeepPeep" on P100 and P4000 GPUs. Additionally, we propose intelligent design maneuvering strategies for thwarting IP theft through the DeepPeep attack and proposed "Secure MobileNet-V1". Interestingly, compared to vanilla MobileNet-V1, secure MobileNet-V1 provides a significant reduction in inference latency (approx60%) and improvement in predictive performance (approx2%) with very-low memory and computation overheads.

In self-supervised visual representation learning, a feature extractor is trained on a "pretext task" for which labels can be generated cheaply, without human annotation. A central challenge in this approach is that the feature extractor quickly learns to exploit low-level visual features such as color aberrations or watermarks and then fails to learn useful semantic representations. Much work has gone into identifying such "shortcut" features and hand-designing schemes to reduce their effect. Here, we propose a general framework for mitigating the effect shortcut features. Our key assumption is that those features which are the first to be exploited for solving the pretext task may also be the most vulnerable to an adversary trained to make the task harder. We show that this assumption holds across common pretext tasks and datasets by training a "lens" network to make small image changes that maximally reduce performance in the pretext task. Representations learned with the modified images outperform those learned without in all tested cases. Additionally, the modifications made by the lens reveal how the choice of pretext task and dataset affects the features learned by self-supervision.

Large-scale datasets play a fundamental role in training deep learning models. However, dataset collection is difficult in domains that involve sensitive information. Collaborative learning techniques provide a privacy-preserving solution, by enabling training over a number of private datasets that are not shared by their owners. However, recently, it has been shown that the existing collaborative learning frameworks are vulnerable to an active adversary that runs a generative adversarial network (GAN) attack. In this work, we propose a novel classification model that is resilient against such attacks by design. More specifically, we introduce a key-based classification model and a principled training scheme that protects class scores by using class-specific private keys, which effectively hide the information necessary for a GAN attack. We additionally show how to utilize high dimensional keys to improve the robustness against attacks without increasing the model complexity. Our detailed experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique. Source code is available at https://github.com/mbsariyildiz/key-protected-classification.

In zero-shot image retrieval (ZSIR) task, embedding learning becomes more attractive, however, many methods follow the traditional metric learning idea and omit the problems behind zero-shot settings. In this paper, we first emphasize the importance of learning visual discriminative metric and preventing the partial/selective learning behavior of learner in ZSIR, and then propose the Decoupled Metric Learning (DeML) framework to achieve these individually. Instead of coarsely optimizing an unified metric, we decouple it into multiple attention-specific parts so as to recurrently induce the discrimination and explicitly enhance the generalization. And they are mainly achieved by our object-attention module based on random walk graph propagation and the channel-attention module based on the adversary constraint, respectively. We demonstrate the necessity of addressing the vital problems in ZSIR on the popular benchmarks, outperforming the state-of-theart methods by a significant margin. Code is available at http://www.bhchen.cn

Wireless sensor networks have emerged as an important and new area in wireless and mobile computing research because of their numerous potential applications that range from indoor deployment scenarios in home and office to outdoor deployment in adversary's territory in tactical battleground. Since in many WSN applications, lives and livelihoods may depend on the timeliness and correctness of sensor data obtained from dispersed sensor nodes, these networks must be secured to prevent any possible attacks that may be launched on them. Security is, therefore, an important issue in WSNs. However, this issue becomes even more critical in cognitive wireless sensor networks, a type of WSN in which the sensor nodes have the capabilities of changing their transmission and reception parameters according to the radio environment under which they operate in order to achieve reliable and efficient communication and optimum utilization of the network resources. This survey paper presents a comprehensive discussion on various security issues in CWSNs by identifying numerous security threats in these networks and defense mechanisms to counter these vulnerabilities. Various types of attacks on CWSNs are categorized under different classes based on their natures and tragets, and corresponding to each attack class, appropriate security mechanisms are presented. The paper also identifies some open problems in this emerging area of wireless networking.

Wireless sensor networks have attracted a lot of interest over the last decade in wireless and mobile computing research community. Applications of these networks are numerous and growing, which range from indoor deployment scenarios in the home and office to outdoor deployment in adversary's territory in a tactical battleground. However, due to distributed nature and their deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their performance. This chapter provides a comprehensive discussion on the state of the art in security technologies for wireless sensor networks. It identifies various possible attacks at different layers of the communication protocol stack in a typical sensor network and their possible countermeasures. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN security is also included.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently garnered significant accomplishments in various exploratory tasks, even surpassing the performance of traditional reinforcement learning-based methods that have historically dominated the agent-based field. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the efficacy of LLMs in executing real-time strategy war tasks within the StarCraft II gaming environment. In this paper, we introduce SwarmBrain, an embodied agent leveraging LLM for real-time strategy implementation in the StarCraft II game environment. The SwarmBrain comprises two key components: 1) a Overmind Intelligence Matrix, powered by state-of-the-art LLMs, is designed to orchestrate macro-level strategies from a high-level perspective. This matrix emulates the overarching consciousness of the Zerg intelligence brain, synthesizing strategic foresight with the aim of allocating resources, directing expansion, and coordinating multi-pronged assaults. 2) a Swarm ReflexNet, which is agile counterpart to the calculated deliberation of the Overmind Intelligence Matrix. Due to the inherent latency in LLM reasoning, the Swarm ReflexNet employs a condition-response state machine framework, enabling expedited tactical responses for fundamental Zerg unit maneuvers. In the experimental setup, SwarmBrain is in control of the Zerg race in confrontation with an Computer-controlled Terran adversary. Experimental results show the capacity of SwarmBrain to conduct economic augmentation, territorial expansion, and tactical formulation, and it shows the SwarmBrain is capable of achieving victory against Computer players set at different difficulty levels.

Due to their multimodal capabilities, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have found numerous impactful applications in real-world scenarios. However, recent studies have revealed that VLMs are vulnerable to image-based adversarial attacks, particularly targeted adversarial images that manipulate the model to generate harmful content specified by the adversary. Current attack methods rely on predefined target labels to create targeted adversarial attacks, which limits their scalability and applicability for large-scale robustness evaluations. In this paper, we propose AnyAttack, a self-supervised framework that generates targeted adversarial images for VLMs without label supervision, allowing any image to serve as a target for the attack. Our framework employs the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm, with the adversarial noise generator pre-trained on the large-scale LAION-400M dataset. This large-scale pre-training endows our method with powerful transferability across a wide range of VLMs. Extensive experiments on five mainstream open-source VLMs (CLIP, BLIP, BLIP2, InstructBLIP, and MiniGPT-4) across three multimodal tasks (image-text retrieval, multimodal classification, and image captioning) demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack. Additionally, we successfully transfer AnyAttack to multiple commercial VLMs, including Google Gemini, Claude Sonnet, Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI GPT. These results reveal an unprecedented risk to VLMs, highlighting the need for effective countermeasures.

Distribution inference, sometimes called property inference, infers statistical properties about a training set from access to a model trained on that data. Distribution inference attacks can pose serious risks when models are trained on private data, but are difficult to distinguish from the intrinsic purpose of statistical machine learning -- namely, to produce models that capture statistical properties about a distribution. Motivated by Yeom et al.'s membership inference framework, we propose a formal definition of distribution inference attacks that is general enough to describe a broad class of attacks distinguishing between possible training distributions. We show how our definition captures previous ratio-based property inference attacks as well as new kinds of attack including revealing the average node degree or clustering coefficient of a training graph. To understand distribution inference risks, we introduce a metric that quantifies observed leakage by relating it to the leakage that would occur if samples from the training distribution were provided directly to the adversary. We report on a series of experiments across a range of different distributions using both novel black-box attacks and improved versions of the state-of-the-art white-box attacks. Our results show that inexpensive attacks are often as effective as expensive meta-classifier attacks, and that there are surprising asymmetries in the effectiveness of attacks. Code is available at https://github.com/iamgroot42/FormEstDistRisks

We present an end-to-end and practical randomness amplification and privatisation protocol based on Bell tests. This allows the building of device-independent random number generators which output (near-)perfectly unbiased and private numbers, even if using an uncharacterised quantum device potentially built by an adversary. Our generation rates are linear in the repetition rate of the quantum device and the classical randomness post-processing has quasi-linear complexity - making it efficient on a standard personal laptop. The statistical analysis is also tailored for real-world quantum devices. Our protocol is then showcased on several different quantum computers. Although not purposely built for the task, we show that quantum computers can run faithful Bell tests by adding minimal assumptions. In this semi-device-independent manner, our protocol generates (near-)perfectly unbiased and private random numbers on today's quantum computers.

Vision-enabled language models (VLMs) are now used to build autonomous multimodal agents capable of taking actions in real environments. In this paper, we show that multimodal agents raise new safety risks, even though attacking agents is more challenging than prior attacks due to limited access to and knowledge about the environment. Our attacks use adversarial text strings to guide gradient-based perturbation over one trigger image in the environment: (1) our captioner attack attacks white-box captioners if they are used to process images into captions as additional inputs to the VLM; (2) our CLIP attack attacks a set of CLIP models jointly, which can transfer to proprietary VLMs. To evaluate the attacks, we curated VisualWebArena-Adv, a set of adversarial tasks based on VisualWebArena, an environment for web-based multimodal agent tasks. Within an L-infinity norm of 16/256 on a single image, the captioner attack can make a captioner-augmented GPT-4V agent execute the adversarial goals with a 75% success rate. When we remove the captioner or use GPT-4V to generate its own captions, the CLIP attack can achieve success rates of 21% and 43%, respectively. Experiments on agents based on other VLMs, such as Gemini-1.5, Claude-3, and GPT-4o, show interesting differences in their robustness. Further analysis reveals several key factors contributing to the attack's success, and we also discuss the implications for defenses as well. Project page: https://chenwu.io/attack-agent Code and data: https://github.com/ChenWu98/agent-attack

Adversarial examples, generated by carefully crafted perturbation, have attracted considerable attention in research fields. Recent works have argued that the existence of the robust and non-robust features is a primary cause of the adversarial examples, and investigated their internal interactions in the feature space. In this paper, we propose a way of explicitly distilling feature representation into the robust and non-robust features, using Information Bottleneck. Specifically, we inject noise variation to each feature unit and evaluate the information flow in the feature representation to dichotomize feature units either robust or non-robust, based on the noise variation magnitude. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that the distilled features are highly correlated with adversarial prediction, and they have human-perceptible semantic information by themselves. Furthermore, we present an attack mechanism intensifying the gradient of non-robust features that is directly related to the model prediction, and validate its effectiveness of breaking model robustness.

Data mixing augmentation has been widely applied to improve the generalization ability of deep neural networks. Recently, offline data mixing augmentation, e.g. handcrafted and saliency information-based mixup, has been gradually replaced by automatic mixing approaches. Through minimizing two sub-tasks, namely, mixed sample generation and mixup classification in an end-to-end way, AutoMix significantly improves accuracy on image classification tasks. However, as the optimization objective is consistent for the two sub-tasks, this approach is prone to generating consistent instead of diverse mixed samples, which results in overfitting for target task training. In this paper, we propose AdAutomixup, an adversarial automatic mixup augmentation approach that generates challenging samples to train a robust classifier for image classification, by alternatively optimizing the classifier and the mixup sample generator. AdAutomixup comprises two modules, a mixed example generator, and a target classifier. The mixed sample generator aims to produce hard mixed examples to challenge the target classifier, while the target classifier's aim is to learn robust features from hard mixed examples to improve generalization. To prevent the collapse of the inherent meanings of images, we further introduce an exponential moving average (EMA) teacher and cosine similarity to train AdAutomixup in an end-to-end way. Extensive experiments on seven image benchmarks consistently prove that our approach outperforms the state of the art in various classification scenarios. The source code is available at https://github.com/JinXins/Adversarial-AutoMixup.

We introduce Adversarial Diffusion Distillation (ADD), a novel training approach that efficiently samples large-scale foundational image diffusion models in just 1-4 steps while maintaining high image quality. We use score distillation to leverage large-scale off-the-shelf image diffusion models as a teacher signal in combination with an adversarial loss to ensure high image fidelity even in the low-step regime of one or two sampling steps. Our analyses show that our model clearly outperforms existing few-step methods (GANs, Latent Consistency Models) in a single step and reaches the performance of state-of-the-art diffusion models (SDXL) in only four steps. ADD is the first method to unlock single-step, real-time image synthesis with foundation models. Code and weights available under https://github.com/Stability-AI/generative-models and https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/ .

Adversarial examples provoke weak reliability and potential security issues in deep neural networks. Although adversarial training has been widely studied to improve adversarial robustness, it works in an over-parameterized regime and requires high computations and large memory budgets. To bridge adversarial robustness and model compression, we propose a novel adversarial pruning method, Masking Adversarial Damage (MAD) that employs second-order information of adversarial loss. By using it, we can accurately estimate adversarial saliency for model parameters and determine which parameters can be pruned without weakening adversarial robustness. Furthermore, we reveal that model parameters of initial layer are highly sensitive to the adversarial examples and show that compressed feature representation retains semantic information for the target objects. Through extensive experiments on three public datasets, we demonstrate that MAD effectively prunes adversarially trained networks without loosing adversarial robustness and shows better performance than previous adversarial pruning methods.

Adversarial examples derived from deliberately crafted perturbations on visual inputs can easily harm decision process of deep neural networks. To prevent potential threats, various adversarial training-based defense methods have grown rapidly and become a de facto standard approach for robustness. Despite recent competitive achievements, we observe that adversarial vulnerability varies across targets and certain vulnerabilities remain prevalent. Intriguingly, such peculiar phenomenon cannot be relieved even with deeper architectures and advanced defense methods. To address this issue, in this paper, we introduce a causal approach called Adversarial Double Machine Learning (ADML), which allows us to quantify the degree of adversarial vulnerability for network predictions and capture the effect of treatments on outcome of interests. ADML can directly estimate causal parameter of adversarial perturbations per se and mitigate negative effects that can potentially damage robustness, bridging a causal perspective into the adversarial vulnerability. Through extensive experiments on various CNN and Transformer architectures, we corroborate that ADML improves adversarial robustness with large margins and relieve the empirical observation.

Adversarial examples pose a significant challenge to the robustness, reliability and alignment of deep neural networks. We propose a novel, easy-to-use approach to achieving high-quality representations that lead to adversarial robustness through the use of multi-resolution input representations and dynamic self-ensembling of intermediate layer predictions. We demonstrate that intermediate layer predictions exhibit inherent robustness to adversarial attacks crafted to fool the full classifier, and propose a robust aggregation mechanism based on Vickrey auction that we call CrossMax to dynamically ensemble them. By combining multi-resolution inputs and robust ensembling, we achieve significant adversarial robustness on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets without any adversarial training or extra data, reaching an adversarial accuracy of approx72% (CIFAR-10) and approx48% (CIFAR-100) on the RobustBench AutoAttack suite (L_infty=8/255) with a finetuned ImageNet-pretrained ResNet152. This represents a result comparable with the top three models on CIFAR-10 and a +5 % gain compared to the best current dedicated approach on CIFAR-100. Adding simple adversarial training on top, we get approx78% on CIFAR-10 and approx51% on CIFAR-100, improving SOTA by 5 % and 9 % respectively and seeing greater gains on the harder dataset. We validate our approach through extensive experiments and provide insights into the interplay between adversarial robustness, and the hierarchical nature of deep representations. We show that simple gradient-based attacks against our model lead to human-interpretable images of the target classes as well as interpretable image changes. As a byproduct, using our multi-resolution prior, we turn pre-trained classifiers and CLIP models into controllable image generators and develop successful transferable attacks on large vision language models.

Hate speech detection models are only as good as the data they are trained on. Datasets sourced from social media suffer from systematic gaps and biases, leading to unreliable models with simplistic decision boundaries. Adversarial datasets, collected by exploiting model weaknesses, promise to fix this problem. However, adversarial data collection can be slow and costly, and individual annotators have limited creativity. In this paper, we introduce GAHD, a new German Adversarial Hate speech Dataset comprising ca.\ 11k examples. During data collection, we explore new strategies for supporting annotators, to create more diverse adversarial examples more efficiently and provide a manual analysis of annotator disagreements for each strategy. Our experiments show that the resulting dataset is challenging even for state-of-the-art hate speech detection models, and that training on GAHD clearly improves model robustness. Further, we find that mixing multiple support strategies is most advantageous. We make GAHD publicly available at https://github.com/jagol/gahd.

Adversarial training improves the robustness of neural networks against adversarial attacks, albeit at the expense of the trade-off between standard and robust generalization. To unveil the underlying factors driving this phenomenon, we examine the layer-wise learning capabilities of neural networks during the transition from a standard to an adversarial setting. Our empirical findings demonstrate that selectively updating specific layers while preserving others can substantially enhance the network's learning capacity. We therefore propose CURE, a novel training framework that leverages a gradient prominence criterion to perform selective conservation, updating, and revision of weights. Importantly, CURE is designed to be dataset- and architecture-agnostic, ensuring its applicability across various scenarios. It effectively tackles both memorization and overfitting issues, thus enhancing the trade-off between robustness and generalization and additionally, this training approach also aids in mitigating "robust overfitting". Furthermore, our study provides valuable insights into the mechanisms of selective adversarial training and offers a promising avenue for future research.

Despite the recent advances in large-scale diffusion models, little progress has been made on the layout-to-image (L2I) synthesis task. Current L2I models either suffer from poor editability via text or weak alignment between the generated image and the input layout. This limits their usability in practice. To mitigate this, we propose to integrate adversarial supervision into the conventional training pipeline of L2I diffusion models (ALDM). Specifically, we employ a segmentation-based discriminator which provides explicit feedback to the diffusion generator on the pixel-level alignment between the denoised image and the input layout. To encourage consistent adherence to the input layout over the sampling steps, we further introduce the multistep unrolling strategy. Instead of looking at a single timestep, we unroll a few steps recursively to imitate the inference process, and ask the discriminator to assess the alignment of denoised images with the layout over a certain time window. Our experiments show that ALDM enables layout faithfulness of the generated images, while allowing broad editability via text prompts. Moreover, we showcase its usefulness for practical applications: by synthesizing target distribution samples via text control, we improve domain generalization of semantic segmentation models by a large margin (~12 mIoU points).

Adversarial training is a practical approach for improving the robustness of deep neural networks against adversarial attacks. Although bringing reliable robustness, the performance toward clean examples is negatively affected after adversarial training, which means a trade-off exists between accuracy and robustness. Recently, some studies have tried to use knowledge distillation methods in adversarial training, achieving competitive performance in improving the robustness but the accuracy for clean samples is still limited. In this paper, to mitigate the accuracy-robustness trade-off, we introduce the Multi-Teacher Adversarial Robustness Distillation (MTARD) to guide the model's adversarial training process by applying a strong clean teacher and a strong robust teacher to handle the clean examples and adversarial examples, respectively. During the optimization process, to ensure that different teachers show similar knowledge scales, we design the Entropy-Based Balance algorithm to adjust the teacher's temperature and keep the teachers' information entropy consistent. Besides, to ensure that the student has a relatively consistent learning speed from multiple teachers, we propose the Normalization Loss Balance algorithm to adjust the learning weights of different types of knowledge. A series of experiments conducted on public datasets demonstrate that MTARD outperforms the state-of-the-art adversarial training and distillation methods against various adversarial attacks.

Adversarial robustness is a key desirable property of neural networks. It has been empirically shown to be affected by their sizes, with larger networks being typically more robust. Recently, Bubeck and Sellke proved a lower bound on the Lipschitz constant of functions that fit the training data in terms of their number of parameters. This raises an interesting open question, do -- and can -- functions with more parameters, but not necessarily more computational cost, have better robustness? We study this question for sparse Mixture of Expert models (MoEs), that make it possible to scale up the model size for a roughly constant computational cost. We theoretically show that under certain conditions on the routing and the structure of the data, MoEs can have significantly smaller Lipschitz constants than their dense counterparts. The robustness of MoEs can suffer when the highest weighted experts for an input implement sufficiently different functions. We next empirically evaluate the robustness of MoEs on ImageNet using adversarial attacks and show they are indeed more robust than dense models with the same computational cost. We make key observations showing the robustness of MoEs to the choice of experts, highlighting the redundancy of experts in models trained in practice.

Adversarial training is exploited to develop a robust Deep Neural Network (DNN) model against the malicious altered data. These attacks may have catastrophic effects on DNN models but are indistinguishable for a human being. For example, an external attack can modify an image adding noises invisible for a human eye, but a DNN model misclassified the image. A key objective for developing robust DNN models is to use a learning algorithm that is fast but can also give model that is robust against different types of adversarial attacks. Especially for adversarial training, enormously long training times are needed for obtaining high accuracy under many different types of adversarial samples generated using different adversarial attack techniques. This paper aims at accelerating the adversarial training to enable fast development of robust DNN models against adversarial attacks. The general method for improving the training performance is the hyperparameters fine-tuning, where the learning rate is one of the most crucial hyperparameters. By modifying its shape (the value over time) and value during the training, we can obtain a model robust to adversarial attacks faster than standard training. First, we conduct experiments on two different datasets (CIFAR10, CIFAR100), exploring various techniques. Then, this analysis is leveraged to develop a novel fast training methodology, AccelAT, which automatically adjusts the learning rate for different epochs based on the accuracy gradient. The experiments show comparable results with the related works, and in several experiments, the adversarial training of DNNs using our AccelAT framework is conducted up to 2 times faster than the existing techniques. Thus, our findings boost the speed of adversarial training in an era in which security and performance are fundamental optimization objectives in DNN-based applications.

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 knowledge in the original model as well as regularizing the pruned model via the Hilbert-Schmidt Information Bottleneck. We comprehensively evaluate our proposed framework and show its superior performance in terms of both adversarial robustness and efficiency when pruning architectures trained on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 datasets against five state-of-the-art attacks. Code is available at https://github.com/neu-spiral/PwoA/.

Adversarial training has been widely used to enhance the robustness of neural network models against adversarial attacks. Despite the popularity of neural network models, a significant gap exists between the natural and robust accuracy of these models. In this paper, we identify one of the primary reasons for this gap is the common use of one-hot vectors as labels, which hinders the learning process for image recognition. Representing ambiguous images with one-hot vectors is imprecise and may lead the model to suboptimal solutions. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel method called Low Temperature Distillation (LTD) that generates soft labels using the modified knowledge distillation framework. Unlike previous approaches, LTD uses a relatively low temperature in the teacher model and fixed, but different temperatures for the teacher and student models. This modification boosts the model's robustness without encountering the gradient masking problem that has been addressed in defensive distillation. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed LTD method combined with previous techniques, achieving robust accuracy rates of 58.19%, 31.13%, and 42.08% on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet data sets, respectively, without additional unlabeled data.

Generative models of natural images have progressed towards high fidelity samples by the strong leveraging of scale. We attempt to carry this success to the field of video modeling by showing that large Generative Adversarial Networks trained on the complex Kinetics-600 dataset are able to produce video samples of substantially higher complexity and fidelity than previous work. Our proposed model, Dual Video Discriminator GAN (DVD-GAN), scales to longer and higher resolution videos by leveraging a computationally efficient decomposition of its discriminator. We evaluate on the related tasks of video synthesis and video prediction, and achieve new state-of-the-art Fr\'echet Inception Distance for prediction for Kinetics-600, as well as state-of-the-art Inception Score for synthesis on the UCF-101 dataset, alongside establishing a strong baseline for synthesis on Kinetics-600.

Speech produced by human vocal apparatus conveys substantial non-semantic information including the gender of the speaker, voice quality, affective state, abnormalities in the vocal apparatus etc. Such information is attributed to the properties of the voice source signal, which is usually estimated from the speech signal. However, most of the source estimation techniques depend heavily on the goodness of the model assumptions and are prone to noise. A popular alternative is to indirectly obtain the source information through the Electroglottographic (EGG) signal that measures the electrical admittance around the vocal folds using dedicated hardware. In this paper, we address the problem of estimating the EGG signal directly from the speech signal, devoid of any hardware. Sampling from the intractable conditional distribution of the EGG signal given the speech signal is accomplished through optimization of an evidence lower bound. This is constructed via minimization of the KL-divergence between the true and the approximated posteriors of a latent variable learned using a deep neural auto-encoder that serves an informative prior. We demonstrate the efficacy of the method at generating the EGG signal by conducting several experiments on datasets comprising multiple speakers, voice qualities, noise settings and speech pathologies. The proposed method is evaluated on many benchmark metrics and is found to agree with the gold standard while proving better than the state-of-the-art algorithms on a few tasks such as epoch extraction.

Adversarial robustness has been conventionally believed as a challenging property to encode for neural networks, requiring plenty of training data. In the recent paradigm of adopting off-the-shelf models, however, access to their training data is often infeasible or not practical, while most of such models are not originally trained concerning adversarial robustness. In this paper, we develop a scalable and model-agnostic solution to achieve adversarial robustness without using any data. Our intuition is to view recent text-to-image diffusion models as "adaptable" denoisers that can be optimized to specify target tasks. Based on this, we propose: (a) to initiate a denoise-and-classify pipeline that offers provable guarantees against adversarial attacks, and (b) to leverage a few synthetic reference images generated from the text-to-image model that enables novel adaptation schemes. Our experiments show that our data-free scheme applied to the pre-trained CLIP could improve the (provable) adversarial robustness of its diverse zero-shot classification derivatives (while maintaining their accuracy), significantly surpassing prior approaches that utilize the full training data. Not only for CLIP, we also demonstrate that our framework is easily applicable for robustifying other visual classifiers efficiently.

As an important part of Music Information Retrieval (MIR), Symbolic Music Understanding (SMU) has gained substantial attention, as it can assist musicians and amateurs in learning and creating music. Recently, pre-trained language models have been widely adopted in SMU because the symbolic music shares a huge similarity with natural language, and the pre-trained manner also helps make full use of limited music data. However, the issue of bias, such as sexism, ageism, and racism, has been observed in pre-trained language models, which is attributed to the imbalanced distribution of training data. It also has a significant influence on the performance of downstream tasks, which also happens in SMU. To address this challenge, we propose Adversarial-MidiBERT, a symbolic music understanding model based on Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). We introduce an unbiased pre-training method based on adversarial learning to minimize the participation of tokens that lead to biases during training. Furthermore, we propose a mask fine-tuning method to narrow the data gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, which can help the model converge faster and perform better. We evaluate our method on four music understanding tasks, and our approach demonstrates excellent performance in all of them. The code for our model is publicly available at https://github.com/RS2002/Adversarial-MidiBERT.

With the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs), it has become a significant concern to ensure their safety and prevent harmful responses. While current safe-alignment methods based on instruction fine-tuning and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) can effectively reduce harmful responses from LLMs, they often require high-quality datasets and heavy computational overhead during model training. Another way to align language models is to modify the logit of tokens in model outputs without heavy training. Recent studies have shown that contrastive decoding can enhance the performance of language models by reducing the likelihood of confused tokens. However, these methods require the manual selection of contrastive models or instruction templates. To this end, we propose Adversarial Contrastive Decoding (ACD), an optimization-based framework to generate two opposite system prompts for prompt-based contrastive decoding. ACD only needs to apply a lightweight prompt tuning on a rather small anchor dataset (< 3 min for each model) without training the target model. Experiments conducted on extensive models and benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves much better safety performance than previous model training-free decoding methods without sacrificing its original generation ability.

Most advances in 3D Generative Adversarial Networks (3D GANs) largely depend on ray casting-based volume rendering, which incurs demanding rendering costs. One promising alternative is rasterization-based 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS), providing a much faster rendering speed and explicit 3D representation. In this paper, we exploit Gaussian as a 3D representation for 3D GANs by leveraging its efficient and explicit characteristics. However, in an adversarial framework, we observe that a na\"ive generator architecture suffers from training instability and lacks the capability to adjust the scale of Gaussians. This leads to model divergence and visual artifacts due to the absence of proper guidance for initialized positions of Gaussians and densification to manage their scales adaptively. To address these issues, we introduce a generator architecture with a hierarchical multi-scale Gaussian representation that effectively regularizes the position and scale of generated Gaussians. Specifically, we design a hierarchy of Gaussians where finer-level Gaussians are parameterized by their coarser-level counterparts; the position of finer-level Gaussians would be located near their coarser-level counterparts, and the scale would monotonically decrease as the level becomes finer, modeling both coarse and fine details of the 3D scene. Experimental results demonstrate that ours achieves a significantly faster rendering speed (x100) compared to state-of-the-art 3D consistent GANs with comparable 3D generation capability. Project page: https://hse1032.github.io/gsgan.

Knowledge distillation (KD) has been shown to be highly effective in guiding a student model with a larger teacher model and achieving practical benefits in improving the computational and memory efficiency for large language models (LLMs). State-of-the-art KD methods for LLMs mostly rely on minimizing explicit distribution distance between teacher and student probability predictions. Instead of optimizing these mandatory behaviour cloning objectives, we explore an imitation learning strategy for KD of LLMs. In particular, we minimize the imitation gap by matching the action-value moments of the teacher's behavior from both on- and off-policy perspectives. To achieve this action-value moment-matching goal, we propose an adversarial training algorithm to jointly estimate the moment-matching distance and optimize the student policy to minimize it. Results from both task-agnostic instruction-following experiments and task-specific experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and achieve new state-of-the-art performance.

Adversarial imitation learning (AIL) has stood out as a dominant framework across various imitation learning (IL) applications, with Discriminator Actor Critic (DAC) (Kostrikov et al.,, 2019) demonstrating the effectiveness of off-policy learning algorithms in improving sample efficiency and scalability to higher-dimensional observations. Despite DAC's empirical success, the original AIL objective is on-policy and DAC's ad-hoc application of off-policy training does not guarantee successful imitation (Kostrikov et al., 2019; 2020). Follow-up work such as ValueDICE (Kostrikov et al., 2020) tackles this issue by deriving a fully off-policy AIL objective. Instead in this work, we develop a novel and principled AIL algorithm via the framework of boosting. Like boosting, our new algorithm, AILBoost, maintains an ensemble of properly weighted weak learners (i.e., policies) and trains a discriminator that witnesses the maximum discrepancy between the distributions of the ensemble and the expert policy. We maintain a weighted replay buffer to represent the state-action distribution induced by the ensemble, allowing us to train discriminators using the entire data collected so far. In the weighted replay buffer, the contribution of the data from older policies are properly discounted with the weight computed based on the boosting framework. Empirically, we evaluate our algorithm on both controller state-based and pixel-based environments from the DeepMind Control Suite. AILBoost outperforms DAC on both types of environments, demonstrating the benefit of properly weighting replay buffer data for off-policy training. On state-based environments, DAC outperforms ValueDICE and IQ-Learn (Gary et al., 2021), achieving competitive performance with as little as one expert trajectory.

Adversarial purification is a defense mechanism for safeguarding classifiers against adversarial attacks without knowing the type of attacks or training of the classifier. These techniques characterize and eliminate adversarial perturbations from the attacked inputs, aiming to restore purified samples that retain similarity to the initially attacked ones and are correctly classified by the classifier. Due to the inherent challenges associated with characterizing noise perturbations for discrete inputs, adversarial text purification has been relatively unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of adversarial purification methods in defending text classifiers. We propose a novel adversarial text purification that harnesses the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to purify adversarial text without the need to explicitly characterize the discrete noise perturbations. We utilize prompt engineering to exploit LLMs for recovering the purified examples for given adversarial examples such that they are semantically similar and correctly classified. Our proposed method demonstrates remarkable performance over various classifiers, improving their accuracy under the attack by over 65% on average.

The deep neural networks are known to be vulnerable to well-designed adversarial attacks. The most successful defense technique based on adversarial training (AT) can achieve optimal robustness against particular attacks but cannot generalize well to unseen attacks. Another effective defense technique based on adversarial purification (AP) can enhance generalization but cannot achieve optimal robustness. Meanwhile, both methods share one common limitation on the degraded standard accuracy. To mitigate these issues, we propose a novel pipeline to acquire the robust purifier model, named Adversarial Training on Purification (AToP), which comprises two components: perturbation destruction by random transforms (RT) and purifier model fine-tuned (FT) by adversarial loss. RT is essential to avoid overlearning to known attacks, resulting in the robustness generalization to unseen attacks, and FT is essential for the improvement of robustness. To evaluate our method in an efficient and scalable way, we conduct extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNette to demonstrate that our method achieves optimal robustness and exhibits generalization ability against unseen attacks.

The notion of adversarial attacks on image classification models based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) is introduced in this work. To classify images, deep learning models called CNNs are frequently used. However, when the networks are subject to adversarial attacks, extremely potent and previously trained CNN models that perform quite effectively on image datasets for image classification tasks may perform poorly. In this work, one well-known adversarial attack known as the fast gradient sign method (FGSM) is explored and its adverse effects on the performances of image classification models are examined. The FGSM attack is simulated on three pre-trained image classifier CNN architectures, ResNet-101, AlexNet, and RegNetY 400MF using randomly chosen images from the ImageNet dataset. The classification accuracies of the models are computed in the absence and presence of the attack to demonstrate the detrimental effect of the attack on the performances of the classifiers. Finally, a mechanism is proposed to defend against the FGSM attack based on a modified defensive distillation-based approach. Extensive results are presented for the validation of the proposed scheme.

Adversarial patches exemplify the tangible manifestation of the threat posed by adversarial attacks on Machine Learning (ML) models in real-world scenarios. Robustness against these attacks is of the utmost importance when designing computer vision applications, especially for safety-critical domains such as CCTV systems. In most practical situations, monitoring open spaces requires multi-view systems to overcome acquisition challenges such as occlusion handling. Multiview object systems are able to combine data from multiple views, and reach reliable detection results even in difficult environments. Despite its importance in real-world vision applications, the vulnerability of multiview systems to adversarial patches is not sufficiently investigated. In this paper, we raise the following question: Does the increased performance and information sharing across views offer as a by-product robustness to adversarial patches? We first conduct a preliminary analysis showing promising robustness against off-the-shelf adversarial patches, even in an extreme setting where we consider patches applied to all views by all persons in Wildtrack benchmark. However, we challenged this observation by proposing two new attacks: (i) In the first attack, targeting a multiview CNN, we maximize the global loss by proposing gradient projection to the different views and aggregating the obtained local gradients. (ii) In the second attack, we focus on a Transformer-based multiview framework. In addition to the focal loss, we also maximize the transformer-specific loss by dissipating its attention blocks. Our results show a large degradation in the detection performance of victim multiview systems with our first patch attack reaching an attack success rate of 73% , while our second proposed attack reduced the performance of its target detector by 62%

Fairness-aware graph neural networks (GNNs) have gained a surge of attention as they can reduce the bias of predictions on any demographic group (e.g., female) in graph-based applications. Although these methods greatly improve the algorithmic fairness of GNNs, the fairness can be easily corrupted by carefully designed adversarial attacks. In this paper, we investigate the problem of adversarial attacks on fairness of GNNs and propose G-FairAttack, a general framework for attacking various types of fairness-aware GNNs in terms of fairness with an unnoticeable effect on prediction utility. In addition, we propose a fast computation technique to reduce the time complexity of G-FairAttack. The experimental study demonstrates that G-FairAttack successfully corrupts the fairness of different types of GNNs while keeping the attack unnoticeable. Our study on fairness attacks sheds light on potential vulnerabilities in fairness-aware GNNs and guides further research on the robustness of GNNs in terms of fairness.

Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) achieves state-of-the-art performances in image generation yet raising copyright and privacy concerns. Adversarial attacks on LDM are then born to protect unauthorized images from being used in LDM-driven few-shot generation. However, these attacks suffer from moderate performance and excessive computational cost, especially in GPU memory. In this paper, we propose an effective adversarial attack on LDM that shows superior performance against state-of-the-art few-shot generation pipeline of LDM, for example, LoRA. We implement the attack with memory efficiency by introducing several mechanisms and decrease the memory cost of the attack to less than 6GB, which allows individual users to run the attack on a majority of consumer GPUs. Our proposed attack can be a practical tool for people facing the copyright and privacy risk brought by LDM to protect themselves.

What spatial frequency information do humans and neural networks use to recognize objects? In neuroscience, critical band masking is an established tool that can reveal the frequency-selective filters used for object recognition. Critical band masking measures the sensitivity of recognition performance to noise added at each spatial frequency. Existing critical band masking studies show that humans recognize periodic patterns (gratings) and letters by means of a spatial-frequency filter (or "channel'') that has a frequency bandwidth of one octave (doubling of frequency). Here, we introduce critical band masking as a task for network-human comparison and test 14 humans and 76 neural networks on 16-way ImageNet categorization in the presence of narrowband noise. We find that humans recognize objects in natural images using the same one-octave-wide channel that they use for letters and gratings, making it a canonical feature of human object recognition. On the other hand, the neural network channel, across various architectures and training strategies, is 2-4 times as wide as the human channel. In other words, networks are vulnerable to high and low frequency noise that does not affect human performance. Adversarial and augmented-image training are commonly used to increase network robustness and shape bias. Does this training align network and human object recognition channels? Three network channel properties (bandwidth, center frequency, peak noise sensitivity) correlate strongly with shape bias (53% variance explained) and with robustness of adversarially-trained networks (74% variance explained). Adversarial training increases robustness but expands the channel bandwidth even further away from the human bandwidth. Thus, critical band masking reveals that the network channel is more than twice as wide as the human channel, and that adversarial training only increases this difference.

This paper addresses the tradeoff between standard accuracy on clean examples and robustness against adversarial examples in deep neural networks (DNNs). Although adversarial training (AT) improves robustness, it degrades the standard accuracy, thus yielding the tradeoff. To mitigate this tradeoff, we propose a novel AT method called ARREST, which comprises three components: (i) adversarial finetuning (AFT), (ii) representation-guided knowledge distillation (RGKD), and (iii) noisy replay (NR). AFT trains a DNN on adversarial examples by initializing its parameters with a DNN that is standardly pretrained on clean examples. RGKD and NR respectively entail a regularization term and an algorithm to preserve latent representations of clean examples during AFT. RGKD penalizes the distance between the representations of the standardly pretrained and AFT DNNs. NR switches input adversarial examples to nonadversarial ones when the representation changes significantly during AFT. By combining these components, ARREST achieves both high standard accuracy and robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that ARREST mitigates the tradeoff more effectively than previous AT-based methods do.

Adversarial robustness is a research area that has recently received a lot of attention in the quest for trustworthy artificial intelligence. However, recent works on adversarial robustness have focused on supervised learning where it is assumed that labeled data is plentiful. In this paper, we investigate semi-supervised adversarial training where labeled data is scarce. We derive two upper bounds for the robust risk and propose a regularization term for unlabeled data motivated by these two upper bounds. Then, we develop a semi-supervised adversarial training algorithm that combines the proposed regularization term with knowledge distillation using a semi-supervised teacher (i.e., a teacher model trained using a semi-supervised learning algorithm). Our experiments show that our proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance with significant margins compared to existing algorithms. In particular, compared to supervised learning algorithms, performance of our proposed algorithm is not much worse even when the amount of labeled data is very small. For example, our algorithm with only 8\% labeled data is comparable to supervised adversarial training algorithms that use all labeled data, both in terms of standard and robust accuracies on CIFAR-10.

Deep neural networks are susceptible to adversarial examples, posing a significant security risk in critical applications. Adversarial Training (AT) is a well-established technique to enhance adversarial robustness, but it often comes at the cost of decreased generalization ability. This paper proposes Robustness Critical Fine-Tuning (RiFT), a novel approach to enhance generalization without compromising adversarial robustness. The core idea of RiFT is to exploit the redundant capacity for robustness by fine-tuning the adversarially trained model on its non-robust-critical module. To do so, we introduce module robust criticality (MRC), a measure that evaluates the significance of a given module to model robustness under worst-case weight perturbations. Using this measure, we identify the module with the lowest MRC value as the non-robust-critical module and fine-tune its weights to obtain fine-tuned weights. Subsequently, we linearly interpolate between the adversarially trained weights and fine-tuned weights to derive the optimal fine-tuned model weights. We demonstrate the efficacy of RiFT on ResNet18, ResNet34, and WideResNet34-10 models trained on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and Tiny-ImageNet datasets. Our experiments show that \method can significantly improve both generalization and out-of-distribution robustness by around 1.5% while maintaining or even slightly enhancing adversarial robustness. Code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/robustlearn.

In Causal Bayesian Optimization (CBO), an agent intervenes on an unknown structural causal model to maximize a downstream reward variable. In this paper, we consider the generalization where other agents or external events also intervene on the system, which is key for enabling adaptiveness to non-stationarities such as weather changes, market forces, or adversaries. We formalize this generalization of CBO as Adversarial Causal Bayesian Optimization (ACBO) and introduce the first algorithm for ACBO with bounded regret: Causal Bayesian Optimization with Multiplicative Weights (CBO-MW). Our approach combines a classical online learning strategy with causal modeling of the rewards. To achieve this, it computes optimistic counterfactual reward estimates by propagating uncertainty through the causal graph. We derive regret bounds for CBO-MW that naturally depend on graph-related quantities. We further propose a scalable implementation for the case of combinatorial interventions and submodular rewards. Empirically, CBO-MW outperforms non-causal and non-adversarial Bayesian optimization methods on synthetic environments and environments based on real-word data. Our experiments include a realistic demonstration of how CBO-MW can be used to learn users' demand patterns in a shared mobility system and reposition vehicles in strategic areas.

Deep neural networks have been widely used in many critical applications, such as autonomous vehicles and medical diagnosis. However, their security is threatened by backdoor attacks, which are achieved by adding artificial patterns to specific training data. Existing defense strategies primarily focus on using reverse engineering to reproduce the backdoor trigger generated by attackers and subsequently repair the DNN model by adding the trigger into inputs and fine-tuning the model with ground-truth labels. However, once the trigger generated by the attackers is complex and invisible, the defender cannot reproduce the trigger successfully then the DNN model will not be repaired, as the trigger is not effectively removed. In this work, we propose Adversarial Feature Map Pruning for Backdoor (FMP) to mitigate backdoor from the DNN. Unlike existing defense strategies, which focus on reproducing backdoor triggers, FMP attempts to prune backdoor feature maps, which are trained to extract backdoor information from inputs. After pruning these backdoor feature maps, FMP will fine-tune the model with a secure subset of training data. Our experiments demonstrate that, compared to existing defense strategies, FMP can effectively reduce the Attack Success Rate (ASR) even against the most complex and invisible attack triggers (e.g., FMP decreases the ASR to 2.86\% in CIFAR10, which is 19.2\% to 65.41\% lower than baselines). Second, unlike conventional defense methods that tend to exhibit low robust accuracy (that is, the accuracy of the model on poisoned data), FMP achieves a higher RA, indicating its superiority in maintaining model performance while mitigating the effects of backdoor attacks (e.g., FMP obtains 87.40\% RA in CIFAR10). Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/retsuh-bqw/FMP.

Generalizing to unseen image domains is a challenging problem primarily due to the lack of diverse training data, inaccessible target data, and the large domain shift that may exist in many real-world settings. As such data augmentation is a critical component of domain generalization methods that seek to address this problem. We present Adversarial Bayesian Augmentation (ABA), a novel algorithm that learns to generate image augmentations in the challenging single-source domain generalization setting. ABA draws on the strengths of adversarial learning and Bayesian neural networks to guide the generation of diverse data augmentations -- these synthesized image domains aid the classifier in generalizing to unseen domains. We demonstrate the strength of ABA on several types of domain shift including style shift, subpopulation shift, and shift in the medical imaging setting. ABA outperforms all previous state-of-the-art methods, including pre-specified augmentations, pixel-based and convolutional-based augmentations.

Quantifying uncertainty is important for actionable predictions in real-world applications. A crucial part of predictive uncertainty quantification is the estimation of epistemic uncertainty, which is defined as an integral of the product between a divergence function and the posterior. Current methods such as Deep Ensembles or MC dropout underperform at estimating the epistemic uncertainty, since they primarily consider the posterior when sampling models. We suggest Quantification of Uncertainty with Adversarial Models (QUAM) to better estimate the epistemic uncertainty. QUAM identifies regions where the whole product under the integral is large, not just the posterior. Consequently, QUAM has lower approximation error of the epistemic uncertainty compared to previous methods. Models for which the product is large correspond to adversarial models (not adversarial examples!). Adversarial models have both a high posterior as well as a high divergence between their predictions and that of a reference model. Our experiments show that QUAM excels in capturing epistemic uncertainty for deep learning models and outperforms previous methods on challenging tasks in the vision domain.

This chapter introduces the concept of adversarial attacks on image classification models built on convolutional neural networks (CNN). CNNs are very popular deep-learning models which are used in image classification tasks. However, very powerful and pre-trained CNN models working very accurately on image datasets for image classification tasks may perform disastrously when the networks are under adversarial attacks. In this work, two very well-known adversarial attacks are discussed and their impact on the performance of image classifiers is analyzed. These two adversarial attacks are the fast gradient sign method (FGSM) and adversarial patch attack. These attacks are launched on three powerful pre-trained image classifier architectures, ResNet-34, GoogleNet, and DenseNet-161. The classification accuracy of the models in the absence and presence of the two attacks are computed on images from the publicly accessible ImageNet dataset. The results are analyzed to evaluate the impact of the attacks on the image classification task.

State-of-the-art few-shot learning (FSL) methods leverage prompt-based fine-tuning to obtain remarkable results for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. While much of the prior FSL methods focus on improving downstream task performance, there is a limited understanding of the adversarial robustness of such methods. In this work, we conduct an extensive study of several state-of-the-art FSL methods to assess their robustness to adversarial perturbations. To better understand the impact of various factors towards robustness (or the lack of it), we evaluate prompt-based FSL methods against fully fine-tuned models for aspects such as the use of unlabeled data, multiple prompts, number of few-shot examples, model size and type. Our results on six GLUE tasks indicate that compared to fully fine-tuned models, vanilla FSL methods lead to a notable relative drop in task performance (i.e., are less robust) in the face of adversarial perturbations. However, using (i) unlabeled data for prompt-based FSL and (ii) multiple prompts flip the trend. We further demonstrate that increasing the number of few-shot examples and model size lead to increased adversarial robustness of vanilla FSL methods. Broadly, our work sheds light on the adversarial robustness evaluation of prompt-based FSL methods for NLU tasks.

One prominent approach toward resolving the adversarial vulnerability of deep neural networks is the two-player zero-sum paradigm of adversarial training, in which predictors are trained against adversarially chosen perturbations of data. Despite the promise of this approach, algorithms based on this paradigm have not engendered sufficient levels of robustness and suffer from pathological behavior like robust overfitting. To understand this shortcoming, we first show that the commonly used surrogate-based relaxation used in adversarial training algorithms voids all guarantees on the robustness of trained classifiers. The identification of this pitfall informs a novel non-zero-sum bilevel formulation of adversarial training, wherein each player optimizes a different objective function. Our formulation yields a simple algorithmic framework that matches and in some cases outperforms state-of-the-art attacks, attains comparable levels of robustness to standard adversarial training algorithms, and does not suffer from robust overfitting.

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples. Adversarial training (AT) is an effective defense against adversarial examples. However, AT is prone to overfitting which degrades robustness substantially. Recently, data augmentation (DA) was shown to be effective in mitigating robust overfitting if appropriately designed and optimized for AT. This work proposes a new method to automatically learn online, instance-wise, DA policies to improve robust generalization for AT. A novel policy learning objective, consisting of Vulnerability, Affinity and Diversity, is proposed and shown to be sufficiently effective and efficient to be practical for automatic DA generation during AT. This allows our method to efficiently explore a large search space for a more effective DA policy and evolve the policy as training progresses. Empirically, our method is shown to outperform or match all competitive DA methods across various model architectures (CNNs and ViTs) and datasets (CIFAR10, SVHN and Imagenette). Our DA policy reinforced vanilla AT to surpass several state-of-the-art AT methods (with baseline DA) in terms of both accuracy and robustness. It can also be combined with those advanced AT methods to produce a further boost in robustness.

Research on adversarial robustness is primarily focused on image and text data. Yet, many scenarios in which lack of robustness can result in serious risks, such as fraud detection, medical diagnosis, or recommender systems often do not rely on images or text but instead on tabular data. Adversarial robustness in tabular data poses two serious challenges. First, tabular datasets often contain categorical features, and therefore cannot be tackled directly with existing optimization procedures. Second, in the tabular domain, algorithms that are not based on deep networks are widely used and offer great performance, but algorithms to enhance robustness are tailored to neural networks (e.g. adversarial training). In this paper, we tackle both challenges. We present a method that allows us to train adversarially robust deep networks for tabular data and to transfer this robustness to other classifiers via universal robust embeddings tailored to categorical data. These embeddings, created using a bilevel alternating minimization framework, can be transferred to boosted trees or random forests making them robust without the need for adversarial training while preserving their high accuracy on tabular data. We show that our methods outperform existing techniques within a practical threat model suitable for tabular data.

Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) is a central task in scientific computing. Recently, neural network approximation of PDEs has received increasing attention due to its flexible meshless discretization and its potential for high-dimensional problems. One fundamental numerical difficulty is that random samples in the training set introduce statistical errors into the discretization of loss functional which may become the dominant error in the final approximation, and therefore overshadow the modeling capability of the neural network. In this work, we propose a new minmax formulation to optimize simultaneously the approximate solution, given by a neural network model, and the random samples in the training set, provided by a deep generative model. The key idea is to use a deep generative model to adjust random samples in the training set such that the residual induced by the approximate PDE solution can maintain a smooth profile when it is being minimized. Such an idea is achieved by implicitly embedding the Wasserstein distance between the residual-induced distribution and the uniform distribution into the loss, which is then minimized together with the residual. A nearly uniform residual profile means that its variance is small for any normalized weight function such that the Monte Carlo approximation error of the loss functional is reduced significantly for a certain sample size. The adversarial adaptive sampling (AAS) approach proposed in this work is the first attempt to formulate two essential components, minimizing the residual and seeking the optimal training set, into one minmax objective functional for the neural network approximation of PDEs.

Adversarial detection aims to determine whether a given sample is an adversarial one based on the discrepancy between natural and adversarial distributions. Unfortunately, estimating or comparing two data distributions is extremely difficult, especially in high-dimension spaces. Recently, the gradient of log probability density (a.k.a., score) w.r.t. the sample is used as an alternative statistic to compute. However, we find that the score is sensitive in identifying adversarial samples due to insufficient information with one sample only. In this paper, we propose a new statistic called expected perturbation score (EPS), which is essentially the expected score of a sample after various perturbations. Specifically, to obtain adequate information regarding one sample, we perturb it by adding various noises to capture its multi-view observations. We theoretically prove that EPS is a proper statistic to compute the discrepancy between two samples under mild conditions. In practice, we can use a pre-trained diffusion model to estimate EPS for each sample. Last, we propose an EPS-based adversarial detection (EPS-AD) method, in which we develop EPS-based maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) as a metric to measure the discrepancy between the test sample and natural samples. We also prove that the EPS-based MMD between natural and adversarial samples is larger than that among natural samples. Extensive experiments show the superior adversarial detection performance of our EPS-AD.

Bayesian inference usually requires running potentially costly inference procedures separately for every new observation. In contrast, the idea of amortized Bayesian inference is to initially invest computational cost in training an inference network on simulated data, which can subsequently be used to rapidly perform inference (i.e., to return estimates of posterior distributions) for new observations. This approach has been applied to many real-world models in the sciences and engineering, but it is unclear how robust the approach is to adversarial perturbations in the observed data. Here, we study the adversarial robustness of amortized Bayesian inference, focusing on simulation-based estimation of multi-dimensional posterior distributions. We show that almost unrecognizable, targeted perturbations of the observations can lead to drastic changes in the predicted posterior and highly unrealistic posterior predictive samples, across several benchmark tasks and a real-world example from neuroscience. We propose a computationally efficient regularization scheme based on penalizing the Fisher information of the conditional density estimator, and show how it improves the adversarial robustness of amortized Bayesian inference.

Nowadays, recognition-synthesis-based methods have been quite popular with voice conversion (VC). By introducing linguistics features with good disentangling characters extracted from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model, the VC performance achieved considerable breakthroughs. Recently, self-supervised learning (SSL) methods trained with a large-scale unannotated speech corpus have been applied to downstream tasks focusing on the content information, which is suitable for VC tasks. However, a huge amount of speaker information in SSL representations degrades timbre similarity and the quality of converted speech significantly. To address this problem, we proposed a high-similarity any-to-one voice conversion method with the input of SSL representations. We incorporated adversarial training mechanisms in the synthesis module using external unannotated corpora. Two auxiliary discriminators were trained to distinguish whether a sequence of mel-spectrograms has been converted by the acoustic model and whether a sequence of content embeddings contains speaker information from external corpora. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves comparable similarity and higher naturalness than the supervised method, which needs a huge amount of annotated corpora for training and is applicable to improve similarity for VC methods with other SSL representations as input.

We present a method for generating alpha mattes using a limited data source. We pretrain a novel transformerbased model (StyleMatte) on portrait datasets. We utilize this model to provide image-mask pairs for the StyleGAN3-based network (StyleMatteGAN). This network is trained unsupervisedly and generates previously unseen imagemask training pairs that are fed back to StyleMatte. We demonstrate that the performance of the matte pulling network improves during this cycle and obtains top results on the human portraits and state-of-the-art metrics on animals dataset. Furthermore, StyleMatteGAN provides high-resolution, privacy-preserving portraits with alpha mattes, making it suitable for various image composition tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/chroneus/stylematte

Counterfactual explanations and adversarial attacks have a related goal: flipping output labels with minimal perturbations regardless of their characteristics. Yet, adversarial attacks cannot be used directly in a counterfactual explanation perspective, as such perturbations are perceived as noise and not as actionable and understandable image modifications. Building on the robust learning literature, this paper proposes an elegant method to turn adversarial attacks into semantically meaningful perturbations, without modifying the classifiers to explain. The proposed approach hypothesizes that Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models are excellent regularizers for avoiding high-frequency and out-of-distribution perturbations when generating adversarial attacks. The paper's key idea is to build attacks through a diffusion model to polish them. This allows studying the target model regardless of its robustification level. Extensive experimentation shows the advantages of our counterfactual explanation approach over current State-of-the-Art in multiple testbeds.

Recently, Diffusion Models (DMs) boost a wave in AI for Art yet raise new copyright concerns, where infringers benefit from using unauthorized paintings to train DMs to generate novel paintings in a similar style. To address these emerging copyright violations, in this paper, we are the first to explore and propose to utilize adversarial examples for DMs to protect human-created artworks. Specifically, we first build a theoretical framework to define and evaluate the adversarial examples for DMs. Then, based on this framework, we design a novel algorithm, named AdvDM, which exploits a Monte-Carlo estimation of adversarial examples for DMs by optimizing upon different latent variables sampled from the reverse process of DMs. Extensive experiments show that the generated adversarial examples can effectively hinder DMs from extracting their features. Therefore, our method can be a powerful tool for human artists to protect their copyright against infringers equipped with DM-based AI-for-Art applications. The code of our method is available on GitHub: https://github.com/mist-project/mist.git.

It is well-known that the performance of well-trained deep neural networks may degrade significantly when they are applied to data with even slightly shifted distributions. Recent studies have shown that introducing certain perturbation on feature statistics (\eg, mean and standard deviation) during training can enhance the cross-domain generalization ability. Existing methods typically conduct such perturbation by utilizing the feature statistics within a mini-batch, limiting their representation capability. Inspired by the domain generalization objective, we introduce a novel Adversarial Style Augmentation (ASA) method, which explores broader style spaces by generating more effective statistics perturbation via adversarial training. Specifically, we first search for the most sensitive direction and intensity for statistics perturbation by maximizing the task loss. By updating the model against the adversarial statistics perturbation during training, we allow the model to explore the worst-case domain and hence improve its generalization performance. To facilitate the application of ASA, we design a simple yet effective module, namely AdvStyle, which instantiates the ASA method in a plug-and-play manner. We justify the efficacy of AdvStyle on tasks of cross-domain classification and instance retrieval. It achieves higher mean accuracy and lower performance fluctuation. Especially, our method significantly outperforms its competitors on the PACS dataset under the single source generalization setting, \eg, boosting the classification accuracy from 61.2\% to 67.1\% with a ResNet50 backbone. Our code will be available at https://github.com/YBZh/AdvStyle.

Adversarial Training is the most effective approach for improving the robustness of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, compared to the large body of research in optimizing the adversarial training process, there are few investigations into how architecture components affect robustness, and they rarely constrain model capacity. Thus, it is unclear where robustness precisely comes from. In this work, we present the first large-scale systematic study on the robustness of DNN architecture components under fixed parameter budgets. Through our investigation, we distill 18 actionable robust network design guidelines that empower model developers to gain deep insights. We demonstrate these guidelines' effectiveness by introducing the novel Robust Architecture (RobArch) model that instantiates the guidelines to build a family of top-performing models across parameter capacities against strong adversarial attacks. RobArch achieves the new state-of-the-art AutoAttack accuracy on the RobustBench ImageNet leaderboard. The code is available at https://github.com/ShengYun-Peng/RobArch{this url}.

Adversarial training is well-known to produce high-quality neural network models that are empirically robust against adversarial perturbations. Nevertheless, once a model has been adversarially trained, one often desires a certification that the model is truly robust against all future attacks. Unfortunately, when faced with adversarially trained models, all existing approaches have significant trouble making certifications that are strong enough to be practically useful. Linear programming (LP) techniques in particular face a "convex relaxation barrier" that prevent them from making high-quality certifications, even after refinement with mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) and branch-and-bound (BnB) techniques. In this paper, we propose a nonconvex certification technique, based on a low-rank restriction of a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation. The nonconvex relaxation makes strong certifications comparable to much more expensive SDP methods, while optimizing over dramatically fewer variables comparable to much weaker LP methods. Despite nonconvexity, we show how off-the-shelf local optimization algorithms can be used to achieve and to certify global optimality in polynomial time. Our experiments find that the nonconvex relaxation almost completely closes the gap towards exact certification of adversarially trained models.

We attack the state-of-the-art Go-playing AI system KataGo by training adversarial policies that play against frozen KataGo victims. Our attack achieves a >99% win rate when KataGo uses no tree search, and a >97% win rate when KataGo uses enough search to be superhuman. We train our adversaries with a modified KataGo implementation, using less than 14% of the compute used to train the original KataGo. Notably, our adversaries do not win by learning to play Go better than KataGo -- in fact, our adversaries are easily beaten by human amateurs. Instead, our adversaries win by tricking KataGo into making serious blunders. Our attack transfers zero-shot to other superhuman Go-playing AIs, and is interpretable to the extent that human experts can successfully implement it, without algorithmic assistance, to consistently beat superhuman AIs. Our results demonstrate that even superhuman AI systems may harbor surprising failure modes. Example games are available at https://goattack.far.ai/.

Adversarial training is a widely used strategy for making neural networks resistant to adversarial perturbations. For a neural network of width m, n input training data in d dimension, it takes Omega(mnd) time cost per training iteration for the forward and backward computation. In this paper we analyze the convergence guarantee of adversarial training procedure on a two-layer neural network with shifted ReLU activation, and shows that only o(m) neurons will be activated for each input data per iteration. Furthermore, we develop an algorithm for adversarial training with time cost o(m n d) per iteration by applying half-space reporting data structure.

Federated learning (FL) is a trending training paradigm to utilize decentralized training data. FL allows clients to update model parameters locally for several epochs, then share them to a global model for aggregation. This training paradigm with multi-local step updating before aggregation exposes unique vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks. Adversarial training is a popular and effective method to improve the robustness of networks against adversaries. In this work, we formulate a general form of federated adversarial learning (FAL) that is adapted from adversarial learning in the centralized setting. On the client side of FL training, FAL has an inner loop to generate adversarial samples for adversarial training and an outer loop to update local model parameters. On the server side, FAL aggregates local model updates and broadcast the aggregated model. We design a global robust training loss and formulate FAL training as a min-max optimization problem. Unlike the convergence analysis in classical centralized training that relies on the gradient direction, it is significantly harder to analyze the convergence in FAL for three reasons: 1) the complexity of min-max optimization, 2) model not updating in the gradient direction due to the multi-local updates on the client-side before aggregation and 3) inter-client heterogeneity. We address these challenges by using appropriate gradient approximation and coupling techniques and present the convergence analysis in the over-parameterized regime. Our main result theoretically shows that the minimum loss under our algorithm can converge to epsilon small with chosen learning rate and communication rounds. It is noteworthy that our analysis is feasible for non-IID clients.

Adversarially robust classifiers possess a trait that non-robust models do not -- Perceptually Aligned Gradients (PAG). Their gradients with respect to the input align well with human perception. Several works have identified PAG as a byproduct of robust training, but none have considered it as a standalone phenomenon nor studied its own implications. In this work, we focus on this trait and test whether Perceptually Aligned Gradients imply Robustness. To this end, we develop a novel objective to directly promote PAG in training classifiers and examine whether models with such gradients are more robust to adversarial attacks. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and architectures validate that models with aligned gradients exhibit significant robustness, exposing the surprising bidirectional connection between PAG and robustness. Lastly, we show that better gradient alignment leads to increased robustness and harness this observation to boost the robustness of existing adversarial training techniques.

We study robustness to test-time adversarial attacks in the regression setting with ell_p losses and arbitrary perturbation sets. We address the question of which function classes are PAC learnable in this setting. We show that classes of finite fat-shattering dimension are learnable in both realizable and agnostic settings. Moreover, for convex function classes, they are even properly learnable. In contrast, some non-convex function classes provably require improper learning algorithms. Our main technique is based on a construction of an adversarially robust sample compression scheme of a size determined by the fat-shattering dimension. Along the way, we introduce a novel agnostic sample compression scheme for real-valued functions, which may be of independent interest.

Domain adversarial training has been ubiquitous for achieving invariant representations and is used widely for various domain adaptation tasks. In recent times, methods converging to smooth optima have shown improved generalization for supervised learning tasks like classification. In this work, we analyze the effect of smoothness enhancing formulations on domain adversarial training, the objective of which is a combination of task loss (eg. classification, regression, etc.) and adversarial terms. We find that converging to a smooth minima with respect to (w.r.t.) task loss stabilizes the adversarial training leading to better performance on target domain. In contrast to task loss, our analysis shows that converging to smooth minima w.r.t. adversarial loss leads to sub-optimal generalization on the target domain. Based on the analysis, we introduce the Smooth Domain Adversarial Training (SDAT) procedure, which effectively enhances the performance of existing domain adversarial methods for both classification and object detection tasks. Our analysis also provides insight into the extensive usage of SGD over Adam in the community for domain adversarial training.

Adversarial training, which is to enhance robustness against adversarial attacks, has received much attention because it is easy to generate human-imperceptible perturbations of data to deceive a given deep neural network. In this paper, we propose a new adversarial training algorithm that is theoretically well motivated and empirically superior to other existing algorithms. A novel feature of the proposed algorithm is to apply more regularization to data vulnerable to adversarial attacks than other existing regularization algorithms do. Theoretically, we show that our algorithm can be understood as an algorithm of minimizing the regularized empirical risk motivated from a newly derived upper bound of the robust risk. Numerical experiments illustrate that our proposed algorithm improves the generalization (accuracy on examples) and robustness (accuracy on adversarial attacks) simultaneously to achieve the state-of-the-art performance.

Overfitting widely exists in adversarial robust training of deep networks. An effective remedy is adversarial weight perturbation, which injects the worst-case weight perturbation during network training by maximizing the classification loss on adversarial examples. Adversarial weight perturbation helps reduce the robust generalization gap; however, it also undermines the robustness improvement. A criterion that regulates the weight perturbation is therefore crucial for adversarial training. In this paper, we propose such a criterion, namely Loss Stationary Condition (LSC) for constrained perturbation. With LSC, we find that it is essential to conduct weight perturbation on adversarial data with small classification loss to eliminate robust overfitting. Weight perturbation on adversarial data with large classification loss is not necessary and may even lead to poor robustness. Based on these observations, we propose a robust perturbation strategy to constrain the extent of weight perturbation. The perturbation strategy prevents deep networks from overfitting while avoiding the side effect of excessive weight perturbation, significantly improving the robustness of adversarial training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art adversarial training methods.

Adversarial purification refers to a class of defense methods that remove adversarial perturbations using a generative model. These methods do not make assumptions on the form of attack and the classification model, and thus can defend pre-existing classifiers against unseen threats. However, their performance currently falls behind adversarial training methods. In this work, we propose DiffPure that uses diffusion models for adversarial purification: Given an adversarial example, we first diffuse it with a small amount of noise following a forward diffusion process, and then recover the clean image through a reverse generative process. To evaluate our method against strong adaptive attacks in an efficient and scalable way, we propose to use the adjoint method to compute full gradients of the reverse generative process. Extensive experiments on three image datasets including CIFAR-10, ImageNet and CelebA-HQ with three classifier architectures including ResNet, WideResNet and ViT demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art results, outperforming current adversarial training and adversarial purification methods, often by a large margin. Project page: https://diffpure.github.io.

Adversarial attacks are a major challenge faced by current machine learning research. These purposely crafted inputs fool even the most advanced models, precluding their deployment in safety-critical applications. Extensive research in computer vision has been carried to develop reliable defense strategies. However, the same issue remains less explored in natural language processing. Our work presents a model-agnostic detector of adversarial text examples. The approach identifies patterns in the logits of the target classifier when perturbing the input text. The proposed detector improves the current state-of-the-art performance in recognizing adversarial inputs and exhibits strong generalization capabilities across different NLP models, datasets, and word-level attacks.

Neural ranking models (NRMs) have shown remarkable success in recent years, especially with pre-trained language models. However, deep neural models are notorious for their vulnerability to adversarial examples. Adversarial attacks may become a new type of web spamming technique given our increased reliance on neural information retrieval models. Therefore, it is important to study potential adversarial attacks to identify vulnerabilities of NRMs before they are deployed. In this paper, we introduce the Word Substitution Ranking Attack (WSRA) task against NRMs, which aims to promote a target document in rankings by adding adversarial perturbations to its text. We focus on the decision-based black-box attack setting, where the attackers cannot directly get access to the model information, but can only query the target model to obtain the rank positions of the partial retrieved list. This attack setting is realistic in real-world search engines. We propose a novel Pseudo Relevance-based ADversarial ranking Attack method (PRADA) that learns a surrogate model based on Pseudo Relevance Feedback (PRF) to generate gradients for finding the adversarial perturbations. Experiments on two web search benchmark datasets show that PRADA can outperform existing attack strategies and successfully fool the NRM with small indiscernible perturbations of text.

In this paper, a new parameter perturbation attack on DNNs, called adversarial parameter attack, is proposed, in which small perturbations to the parameters of the DNN are made such that the accuracy of the attacked DNN does not decrease much, but its robustness becomes much lower. The adversarial parameter attack is stronger than previous parameter perturbation attacks in that the attack is more difficult to be recognized by users and the attacked DNN gives a wrong label for any modified sample input with high probability. The existence of adversarial parameters is proved. For a DNN F_{Theta} with the parameter set Theta satisfying certain conditions, it is shown that if the depth of the DNN is sufficiently large, then there exists an adversarial parameter set Theta_a for Theta such that the accuracy of F_{Theta_a} is equal to that of F_{Theta}, but the robustness measure of F_{Theta_a} is smaller than any given bound. An effective training algorithm is given to compute adversarial parameters and numerical experiments are used to demonstrate that the algorithms are effective to produce high quality adversarial parameters.

Large-scale pre-trained language models have achieved tremendous success across a wide range of natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, even surpassing human performance. However, recent studies reveal that the robustness of these models can be challenged by carefully crafted textual adversarial examples. While several individual datasets have been proposed to evaluate model robustness, a principled and comprehensive benchmark is still missing. In this paper, we present Adversarial GLUE (AdvGLUE), a new multi-task benchmark to quantitatively and thoroughly explore and evaluate the vulnerabilities of modern large-scale language models under various types of adversarial attacks. In particular, we systematically apply 14 textual adversarial attack methods to GLUE tasks to construct AdvGLUE, which is further validated by humans for reliable annotations. Our findings are summarized as follows. (i) Most existing adversarial attack algorithms are prone to generating invalid or ambiguous adversarial examples, with around 90% of them either changing the original semantic meanings or misleading human annotators as well. Therefore, we perform a careful filtering process to curate a high-quality benchmark. (ii) All the language models and robust training methods we tested perform poorly on AdvGLUE, with scores lagging far behind the benign accuracy. We hope our work will motivate the development of new adversarial attacks that are more stealthy and semantic-preserving, as well as new robust language models against sophisticated adversarial attacks. AdvGLUE is available at https://adversarialglue.github.io.

Current dense text retrieval models face two typical challenges. First, they adopt a siamese dual-encoder architecture to encode queries and documents independently for fast indexing and searching, while neglecting the finer-grained term-wise interactions. This results in a sub-optimal recall performance. Second, their model training highly relies on a negative sampling technique to build up the negative documents in their contrastive losses. To address these challenges, we present Adversarial Retriever-Ranker (AR2), which consists of a dual-encoder retriever plus a cross-encoder ranker. The two models are jointly optimized according to a minimax adversarial objective: the retriever learns to retrieve negative documents to cheat the ranker, while the ranker learns to rank a collection of candidates including both the ground-truth and the retrieved ones, as well as providing progressive direct feedback to the dual-encoder retriever. Through this adversarial game, the retriever gradually produces harder negative documents to train a better ranker, whereas the cross-encoder ranker provides progressive feedback to improve retriever. We evaluate AR2 on three benchmarks. Experimental results show that AR2 consistently and significantly outperforms existing dense retriever methods and achieves new state-of-the-art results on all of them. This includes the improvements on Natural Questions R@5 to 77.9%(+2.1%), TriviaQA R@5 to 78.2%(+1.4), and MS-MARCO MRR@10 to 39.5%(+1.3%). Code and models are available at https://github.com/microsoft/AR2.

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 Adversarial Training (RAT) defense method that first utilizes the attack path generated by the typical iterative attack method of projected gradient descent (PGD), and constructs an adversarial region based on the attack path. Then, RAT samples diverse perturbed training points efficiently inside this region, and utilizes a distance-aware label smoothing mechanism to capture our intuition that perturbed points at different locations should have different impact on the model performance. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets show that RAT consistently makes significant improvement on standard adversarial training (SAT), and exhibits better robust generalization.

Adversarial training has been empirically proven to be one of the most effective and reliable defense methods against adversarial attacks. However, almost all existing studies about adversarial training are focused on balanced datasets, where each class has an equal amount of training examples. Research on adversarial training with imbalanced training datasets is rather limited. As the initial effort to investigate this problem, we reveal the facts that adversarially trained models present two distinguished behaviors from naturally trained models in imbalanced datasets: (1) Compared to natural training, adversarially trained models can suffer much worse performance on under-represented classes, when the training dataset is extremely imbalanced. (2) Traditional reweighting strategies may lose efficacy to deal with the imbalance issue for adversarial training. For example, upweighting the under-represented classes will drastically hurt the model's performance on well-represented classes, and as a result, finding an optimal reweighting value can be tremendously challenging. In this paper, to further understand our observations, we theoretically show that the poor data separability is one key reason causing this strong tension between under-represented and well-represented classes. Motivated by this finding, we propose Separable Reweighted Adversarial Training (SRAT) to facilitate adversarial training under imbalanced scenarios, by learning more separable features for different classes. Extensive experiments on various datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Although attention mechanisms have become fundamental components of deep learning models, they are vulnerable to perturbations, which may degrade the prediction performance and model interpretability. Adversarial training (AT) for attention mechanisms has successfully reduced such drawbacks by considering adversarial perturbations. However, this technique requires label information, and thus, its use is limited to supervised settings. In this study, we explore the concept of incorporating virtual AT (VAT) into the attention mechanisms, by which adversarial perturbations can be computed even from unlabeled data. To realize this approach, we propose two general training techniques, namely VAT for attention mechanisms (Attention VAT) and "interpretable" VAT for attention mechanisms (Attention iVAT), which extend AT for attention mechanisms to a semi-supervised setting. In particular, Attention iVAT focuses on the differences in attention; thus, it can efficiently learn clearer attention and improve model interpretability, even with unlabeled data. Empirical experiments based on six public datasets revealed that our techniques provide better prediction performance than conventional AT-based as well as VAT-based techniques, and stronger agreement with evidence that is provided by humans in detecting important words in sentences. Moreover, our proposal offers these advantages without needing to add the careful selection of unlabeled data. That is, even if the model using our VAT-based technique is trained on unlabeled data from a source other than the target task, both the prediction performance and model interpretability can be improved.

In this paper, we explore open-domain sketch-to-photo translation, which aims to synthesize a realistic photo from a freehand sketch with its class label, even if the sketches of that class are missing in the training data. It is challenging due to the lack of training supervision and the large geometric distortion between the freehand sketch and photo domains. To synthesize the absent freehand sketches from photos, we propose a framework that jointly learns sketch-to-photo and photo-to-sketch generation. However, the generator trained from fake sketches might lead to unsatisfying results when dealing with sketches of missing classes, due to the domain gap between synthesized sketches and real ones. To alleviate this issue, we further propose a simple yet effective open-domain sampling and optimization strategy to "fool" the generator into treating fake sketches as real ones. Our method takes advantage of the learned sketch-to-photo and photo-to-sketch mapping of in-domain data and generalizes it to the open-domain classes. We validate our method on the Scribble and SketchyCOCO datasets. Compared with the recent competing methods, our approach shows impressive results in synthesizing realistic color, texture, and maintaining the geometric composition for various categories of open-domain sketches. Our code is available at https://github.com/Mukosame/AODA

Adversarial attacks expose important vulnerabilities of deep learning models, yet little attention has been paid to settings where data arrives as a stream. In this paper, we formalize the online adversarial attack problem, emphasizing two key elements found in real-world use-cases: attackers must operate under partial knowledge of the target model, and the decisions made by the attacker are irrevocable since they operate on a transient data stream. We first rigorously analyze a deterministic variant of the online threat model by drawing parallels to the well-studied k-secretary problem in theoretical computer science and propose Virtual+, a simple yet practical online algorithm. Our main theoretical result shows Virtual+ yields provably the best competitive ratio over all single-threshold algorithms for k<5 -- extending the previous analysis of the k-secretary problem. We also introduce the stochastic k-secretary -- effectively reducing online blackbox transfer attacks to a k-secretary problem under noise -- and prove theoretical bounds on the performance of Virtual+ adapted to this setting. Finally, we complement our theoretical results by conducting experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and Imagenet classifiers, revealing the necessity of online algorithms in achieving near-optimal performance and also the rich interplay between attack strategies and online attack selection, enabling simple strategies like FGSM to outperform stronger adversaries.

We propose a new defense mechanism against adversarial attacks inspired by an optical co-processor, providing robustness without compromising natural accuracy in both white-box and black-box settings. This hardware co-processor performs a nonlinear fixed random transformation, where the parameters are unknown and impossible to retrieve with sufficient precision for large enough dimensions. In the white-box setting, our defense works by obfuscating the parameters of the random projection. Unlike other defenses relying on obfuscated gradients, we find we are unable to build a reliable backward differentiable approximation for obfuscated parameters. Moreover, while our model reaches a good natural accuracy with a hybrid backpropagation - synthetic gradient method, the same approach is suboptimal if employed to generate adversarial examples. We find the combination of a random projection and binarization in the optical system also improves robustness against various types of black-box attacks. Finally, our hybrid training method builds robust features against transfer attacks. We demonstrate our approach on a VGG-like architecture, placing the defense on top of the convolutional features, on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. Code is available at https://github.com/lightonai/adversarial-robustness-by-design.

Transfer learning from pretrained language models recently became the dominant approach for solving many NLP tasks. A common approach to transfer learning for multiple tasks that maximize parameter sharing trains one or more task-specific layers on top of the language model. In this paper, we present an alternative approach based on adversarial reprogramming, which extends earlier work on automatic prompt generation. Adversarial reprogramming attempts to learn task-specific word embeddings that, when concatenated to the input text, instruct the language model to solve the specified task. Using up to 25K trainable parameters per task, this approach outperforms all existing methods with up to 25M trainable parameters on the public leaderboard of the GLUE benchmark. Our method, initialized with task-specific human-readable prompts, also works in a few-shot setting, outperforming GPT-3 on two SuperGLUE tasks with just 32 training samples.

Adversarial Training (AT) with Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) is an effective approach for improving the robustness of the deep neural networks. However, PGD AT has been shown to suffer from two main limitations: i) high computational cost, and ii) extreme overfitting during training that leads to reduction in model generalization. While the effect of factors such as model capacity and scale of training data on adversarial robustness have been extensively studied, little attention has been paid to the effect of a very important parameter in every network optimization on adversarial robustness: the learning rate. In particular, we hypothesize that effective learning rate scheduling during adversarial training can significantly reduce the overfitting issue, to a degree where one does not even need to adversarially train a model from scratch but can instead simply adversarially fine-tune a pre-trained model. Motivated by this hypothesis, we propose a simple yet very effective adversarial fine-tuning approach based on a slow start, fast decay learning rate scheduling strategy which not only significantly decreases computational cost required, but also greatly improves the accuracy and robustness of a deep neural network. Experimental results show that the proposed adversarial fine-tuning approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets in both test accuracy and the robustness, while reducing the computational cost by 8-10times. Furthermore, a very important benefit of the proposed adversarial fine-tuning approach is that it enables the ability to improve the robustness of any pre-trained deep neural network without needing to train the model from scratch, which to the best of the authors' knowledge has not been previously demonstrated in research literature.

In speech technologies, speaker's voice representation is used in many applications such as speech recognition, voice conversion, speech synthesis and, obviously, user authentication. Modern vocal representations of the speaker are based on neural embeddings. In addition to the targeted information, these representations usually contain sensitive information about the speaker, like the age, sex, physical state, education level or ethnicity. In order to allow the user to choose which information to protect, we introduce in this paper the concept of attribute-driven privacy preservation in speaker voice representation. It allows a person to hide one or more personal aspects to a potential malicious interceptor and to the application provider. As a first solution to this concept, we propose to use an adversarial autoencoding method that disentangles in the voice representation a given speaker attribute thus allowing its concealment. We focus here on the sex attribute for an Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) task. Experiments carried out using the VoxCeleb datasets have shown that the proposed method enables the concealment of this attribute while preserving ASV ability.

Recent advances in maximizing mutual information (MI) between the source and target have demonstrated its effectiveness in text generation. However, previous works paid little attention to modeling the backward network of MI (i.e., dependency from the target to the source), which is crucial to the tightness of the variational information maximization lower bound. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Mutual Information (AMI): a text generation framework which is formed as a novel saddle point (min-max) optimization aiming to identify joint interactions between the source and target. Within this framework, the forward and backward networks are able to iteratively promote or demote each other's generated instances by comparing the real and synthetic data distributions. We also develop a latent noise sampling strategy that leverages random variations at the high-level semantic space to enhance the long term dependency in the generation process. Extensive experiments based on different text generation tasks demonstrate that the proposed AMI framework can significantly outperform several strong baselines, and we also show that AMI has potential to lead to a tighter lower bound of maximum mutual information for the variational information maximization problem.

Increasingly more similarities between human vision and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been revealed in the past few years. Yet, vanilla CNNs often fall short in generalizing to adversarial or out-of-distribution (OOD) examples which humans demonstrate superior performance. Adversarial training is a leading learning algorithm for improving the robustness of CNNs on adversarial and OOD data; however, little is known about the properties, specifically the shape bias and internal features learned inside adversarially-robust CNNs. In this paper, we perform a thorough, systematic study to understand the shape bias and some internal mechanisms that enable the generalizability of AlexNet, GoogLeNet, and ResNet-50 models trained via adversarial training. We find that while standard ImageNet classifiers have a strong texture bias, their R counterparts rely heavily on shapes. Remarkably, adversarial training induces three simplicity biases into hidden neurons in the process of "robustifying" CNNs. That is, each convolutional neuron in R networks often changes to detecting (1) pixel-wise smoother patterns, i.e., a mechanism that blocks high-frequency noise from passing through the network; (2) more lower-level features i.e. textures and colors (instead of objects);and (3) fewer types of inputs. Our findings reveal the interesting mechanisms that made networks more adversarially robust and also explain some recent findings e.g., why R networks benefit from a much larger capacity (Xie et al. 2020) and can act as a strong image prior in image synthesis (Santurkar et al. 2019).

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 landscape and robust generalization gap. Several well-recognized adversarial training improvements, such as early stopping, designing new objective functions, or leveraging unlabeled data, all implicitly flatten the weight loss landscape. Based on these observations, we propose a simple yet effective Adversarial Weight Perturbation (AWP) to explicitly regularize the flatness of weight loss landscape, forming a double-perturbation mechanism in the adversarial training framework that adversarially perturbs both inputs and weights. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AWP indeed brings flatter weight loss landscape and can be easily incorporated into various existing adversarial training methods to further boost their adversarial robustness.

Autoencoder networks are unsupervised approaches aiming at combining generative and representational properties by learning simultaneously an encoder-generator map. Although studied extensively, the issues of whether they have the same generative power of GANs, or learn disentangled representations, have not been fully addressed. We introduce an autoencoder that tackles these issues jointly, which we call Adversarial Latent Autoencoder (ALAE). It is a general architecture that can leverage recent improvements on GAN training procedures. We designed two autoencoders: one based on a MLP encoder, and another based on a StyleGAN generator, which we call StyleALAE. We verify the disentanglement properties of both architectures. We show that StyleALAE can not only generate 1024x1024 face images with comparable quality of StyleGAN, but at the same resolution can also produce face reconstructions and manipulations based on real images. This makes ALAE the first autoencoder able to compare with, and go beyond the capabilities of a generator-only type of architecture.

Adversarial examples are commonly viewed as a threat to ConvNets. Here we present an opposite perspective: adversarial examples can be used to improve image recognition models if harnessed in the right manner. We propose AdvProp, an enhanced adversarial training scheme which treats adversarial examples as additional examples, to prevent overfitting. Key to our method is the usage of a separate auxiliary batch norm for adversarial examples, as they have different underlying distributions to normal examples. We show that AdvProp improves a wide range of models on various image recognition tasks and performs better when the models are bigger. For instance, by applying AdvProp to the latest EfficientNet-B7 [28] on ImageNet, we achieve significant improvements on ImageNet (+0.7%), ImageNet-C (+6.5%), ImageNet-A (+7.0%), Stylized-ImageNet (+4.8%). With an enhanced EfficientNet-B8, our method achieves the state-of-the-art 85.5% ImageNet top-1 accuracy without extra data. This result even surpasses the best model in [20] which is trained with 3.5B Instagram images (~3000X more than ImageNet) and ~9.4X more parameters. Models are available at https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/efficientnet.

We study the problem of adversarial language games, in which multiple agents with conflicting goals compete with each other via natural language interactions. While adversarial language games are ubiquitous in human activities, little attention has been devoted to this field in natural language processing. In this work, we propose a challenging adversarial language game called Adversarial Taboo as an example, in which an attacker and a defender compete around a target word. The attacker is tasked with inducing the defender to utter the target word invisible to the defender, while the defender is tasked with detecting the target word before being induced by the attacker. In Adversarial Taboo, a successful attacker must hide its intention and subtly induce the defender, while a competitive defender must be cautious with its utterances and infer the intention of the attacker. Such language abilities can facilitate many important downstream NLP tasks. To instantiate the game, we create a game environment and a competition platform. Comprehensive experiments and empirical studies on several baseline attack and defense strategies show promising and interesting results. Based on the analysis on the game and experiments, we discuss multiple promising directions for future research.

We introduce a new large-scale NLI benchmark dataset, collected via an iterative, adversarial human-and-model-in-the-loop procedure. We show that training models on this new dataset leads to state-of-the-art performance on a variety of popular NLI benchmarks, while posing a more difficult challenge with its new test set. Our analysis sheds light on the shortcomings of current state-of-the-art models, and shows that non-expert annotators are successful at finding their weaknesses. The data collection method can be applied in a never-ending learning scenario, becoming a moving target for NLU, rather than a static benchmark that will quickly saturate.

Key challenges for the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world are the discovery, representation and reuse of skills in the absence of a reward function. To this end, we propose a novel approach to learn a task-agnostic skill embedding space from unlabeled multi-view videos. Our method learns a general skill embedding independently from the task context by using an adversarial loss. We combine a metric learning loss, which utilizes temporal video coherence to learn a state representation, with an entropy regularized adversarial skill-transfer loss. The metric learning loss learns a disentangled representation by attracting simultaneous viewpoints of the same observations and repelling visually similar frames from temporal neighbors. The adversarial skill-transfer loss enhances re-usability of learned skill embeddings over multiple task domains. We show that the learned embedding enables training of continuous control policies to solve novel tasks that require the interpolation of previously seen skills. Our extensive evaluation with both simulation and real world data demonstrates the effectiveness of our method in learning transferable skills from unlabeled interaction videos and composing them for new tasks. Code, pretrained models and dataset are available at http://robotskills.cs.uni-freiburg.de

Adversarially trained generative models (GANs) have recently achieved compelling image synthesis results. But despite early successes in using GANs for unsupervised representation learning, they have since been superseded by approaches based on self-supervision. In this work we show that progress in image generation quality translates to substantially improved representation learning performance. Our approach, BigBiGAN, builds upon the state-of-the-art BigGAN model, extending it to representation learning by adding an encoder and modifying the discriminator. We extensively evaluate the representation learning and generation capabilities of these BigBiGAN models, demonstrating that these generation-based models achieve the state of the art in unsupervised representation learning on ImageNet, as well as in unconditional image generation. Pretrained BigBiGAN models -- including image generators and encoders -- are available on TensorFlow Hub (https://tfhub.dev/s?publisher=deepmind&q=bigbigan).

Graph neural network (GNN), as a powerful representation learning model on graph data, attracts much attention across various disciplines. However, recent studies show that GNN is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. How to make GNN more robust? What are the key vulnerabilities in GNN? How to address the vulnerabilities and defense GNN against the adversarial attacks? In this paper, we propose DefNet, an effective adversarial defense framework for GNNs. In particular, we first investigate the latent vulnerabilities in every layer of GNNs and propose corresponding strategies including dual-stage aggregation and bottleneck perceptron. Then, to cope with the scarcity of training data, we propose an adversarial contrastive learning method to train the GNN in a conditional GAN manner by leveraging the high-level graph representation. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DefNet in improving the robustness of popular GNN variants, such as Graph Convolutional Network and GraphSAGE, under various types of adversarial attacks.

Time-frequency (TF) representations provide powerful and intuitive features for the analysis of time series such as audio. But still, generative modeling of audio in the TF domain is a subtle matter. Consequently, neural audio synthesis widely relies on directly modeling the waveform and previous attempts at unconditionally synthesizing audio from neurally generated invertible TF features still struggle to produce audio at satisfying quality. In this article, focusing on the short-time Fourier transform, we discuss the challenges that arise in audio synthesis based on generated invertible TF features and how to overcome them. We demonstrate the potential of deliberate generative TF modeling by training a generative adversarial network (GAN) on short-time Fourier features. We show that by applying our guidelines, our TF-based network was able to outperform a state-of-the-art GAN generating waveforms directly, despite the similar architecture in the two networks.

To accelerate research on adversarial examples and robustness of machine learning classifiers, Google Brain organized a NIPS 2017 competition that encouraged researchers to develop new methods to generate adversarial examples as well as to develop new ways to defend against them. In this chapter, we describe the structure and organization of the competition and the solutions developed by several of the top-placing teams.

Users like sharing personal photos with others through social media. At the same time, they might want to make automatic identification in such photos difficult or even impossible. Classic obfuscation methods such as blurring are not only unpleasant but also not as effective as one would expect. Recent studies on adversarial image perturbations (AIP) suggest that it is possible to confuse recognition systems effectively without unpleasant artifacts. However, in the presence of counter measures against AIPs, it is unclear how effective AIP would be in particular when the choice of counter measure is unknown. Game theory provides tools for studying the interaction between agents with uncertainties in the strategies. We introduce a general game theoretical framework for the user-recogniser dynamics, and present a case study that involves current state of the art AIP and person recognition techniques. We derive the optimal strategy for the user that assures an upper bound on the recognition rate independent of the recogniser's counter measure. Code is available at https://goo.gl/hgvbNK.

The ability of the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) framework to learn generative models mapping from simple latent distributions to arbitrarily complex data distributions has been demonstrated empirically, with compelling results showing that the latent space of such generators captures semantic variation in the data distribution. Intuitively, models trained to predict these semantic latent representations given data may serve as useful feature representations for auxiliary problems where semantics are relevant. However, in their existing form, GANs have no means of learning the inverse mapping -- projecting data back into the latent space. We propose Bidirectional Generative Adversarial Networks (BiGANs) as a means of learning this inverse mapping, and demonstrate that the resulting learned feature representation is useful for auxiliary supervised discrimination tasks, competitive with contemporary approaches to unsupervised and self-supervised feature learning.

Adversarial training provides a means of regularizing supervised learning algorithms while virtual adversarial training is able to extend supervised learning algorithms to the semi-supervised setting. However, both methods require making small perturbations to numerous entries of the input vector, which is inappropriate for sparse high-dimensional inputs such as one-hot word representations. We extend adversarial and virtual adversarial training to the text domain by applying perturbations to the word embeddings in a recurrent neural network rather than to the original input itself. The proposed method achieves state of the art results on multiple benchmark semi-supervised and purely supervised tasks. We provide visualizations and analysis showing that the learned word embeddings have improved in quality and that while training, the model is less prone to overfitting. Code is available at https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/adversarial_text.