Adversarial Examples Might be Avoidable: The Role of Data Concentration in Adversarial Robustness

The susceptibility of modern machine learning classifiers to adversarial examples has motivated theoretical results suggesting that these might be unavoidable. However, these results can be too general to be applicable to natural data distributions. Indeed, humans are quite robust for tasks involving vision. This apparent conflict motivates a deeper dive into the question: Are adversarial examples truly unavoidable? In this work, we theoretically demonstrate that a key property of the data distribution -- concentration on small-volume subsets of the input space -- determines whether a robust classifier exists. We further demonstrate that, for a data distribution concentrated on a union of low-dimensional linear subspaces, exploiting data structure naturally leads to classifiers that enjoy good robustness guarantees, improving upon methods for provable certification in certain regimes.

Understanding Noise-Augmented Training for Randomized Smoothing

Randomized smoothing is a technique for providing provable robustness guarantees against adversarial attacks while making minimal assumptions about a classifier. This method relies on taking a majority vote of any base classifier over multiple noise-perturbed inputs to obtain a smoothed classifier, and it remains the tool of choice to certify deep and complex neural network models. Nonetheless, non-trivial performance of such smoothed classifier crucially depends on the base model being trained on noise-augmented data, i.e., on a smoothed input distribution. While widely adopted in practice, it is still unclear how this noisy training of the base classifier precisely affects the risk of the robust smoothed classifier, leading to heuristics and tricks that are poorly understood. In this work we analyze these trade-offs theoretically in a binary classification setting, proving that these common observations are not universal. We show that, without making stronger distributional assumptions, no benefit can be expected from predictors trained with noise-augmentation, and we further characterize distributions where such benefit is obtained. Our analysis has direct implications to the practical deployment of randomized smoothing, and we illustrate some of these via experiments on CIFAR-10 and MNIST, as well as on synthetic datasets.

On Utilizing Relationships for Transferable Few-Shot Fine-Grained Object Detection

State-of-the-art object detectors are fast and accurate, but they require a large amount of well annotated training data to obtain good performance. However, obtaining a large amount of training annotations specific to a particular task, i.e., fine-grained annotations, is costly in practice. In contrast, obtaining common-sense relationships from text, e.g., "a table-lamp is a lamp that sits on top of a table", is much easier. Additionally, common-sense relationships like "on-top-of" are easy to annotate in a task-agnostic fashion. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic model that uses such relational knowledge to transform an off-the-shelf detector of coarse object categories (e.g., "table", "lamp") into a detector of fine-grained categories (e.g., "table-lamp"). We demonstrate that our method, RelDetect, achieves performance competitive to finetuning based state-of-the-art object detector baselines when an extremely low amount of fine-grained annotations is available ($0.2\%$ of entire dataset). We also demonstrate that RelDetect is able to utilize the inherent transferability of relationship information to obtain a better performance ($+5$ mAP points) than the above baselines on an unseen dataset (zero-shot transfer). In summary, we demonstrate the power of using relationships for object detection on datasets where fine-grained object categories can be linked to coarse-grained categories via suitable relationships.

A Game Theoretic Analysis of Additive Adversarial Attacks and Defenses

Research in adversarial learning follows a cat and mouse game between attackers and defenders where attacks are proposed, they are mitigated by new defenses, and subsequently new attacks are proposed that break earlier defenses, and so on. However, it has remained unclear as to whether there are conditions under which no better attacks or defenses can be proposed. In this paper, we propose a game-theoretic framework for studying attacks and defenses which exist in equilibrium. Under a locally linear decision boundary model for the underlying binary classifier, we prove that the Fast Gradient Method attack and the Randomized Smoothing defense form a Nash Equilibrium. We then show how this equilibrium defense can be approximated given finitely many samples from a data-generating distribution, and derive a generalization bound for the performance of our approximation.

On the Regularization Properties of Structured Dropout

Dropout and its extensions (eg. DropBlock and DropConnect) are popular heuristics for training neural networks, which have been shown to improve generalization performance in practice. However, a theoretical understanding of their optimization and regularization properties remains elusive. Recent work shows that in the case of single hidden-layer linear networks, Dropout is a stochastic gradient descent method for minimizing a regularized loss, and that the regularizer induces solutions that are low-rank and balanced. In this work we show that for single hidden-layer linear networks, DropBlock induces spectral k-support norm regularization, and promotes solutions that are low-rank and have factors with equal norm. We also show that the global minimizer for DropBlock can be computed in closed form, and that DropConnect is equivalent to Dropout. We then show that some of these results can be extended to a general class of Dropout-strategies, and, with some assumptions, to deep non-linear networks when Dropout is applied to the last layer. We verify our theoretical claims and assumptions experimentally with commonly used network architectures.

An Empirical Evaluation of Visual Question Answering for Novel Objects

We study the problem of answering questions about images in the harder setting, where the test questions and corresponding images contain novel objects, which were not queried about in the training data. Such setting is inevitable in real world-owing to the heavy tailed distribution of the visual categories, there would be some objects which would not be annotated in the train set. We show that the performance of two popular existing methods drop significantly (up to 28%) when evaluated on novel objects cf. known objects. We propose methods which use large existing external corpora of (i) unlabeled text, i.e. books, and (ii) images tagged with classes, to achieve novel object based visual question answering. We do systematic empirical studies, for both an oracle case where the novel objects are known textually, as well as a fully automatic case without any explicit knowledge of the novel objects, but with the minimal assumption that the novel objects are semantically related to the existing objects in training. The proposed methods for novel object based visual question answering are modular and can potentially be used with many visual question answering architectures. We show consistent improvements with the two popular architectures and give qualitative analysis of the cases where the model does well and of those where it fails to bring improvements.