As machine learning techniques become increasingly prevalent in data analysis, the threat of adversarial attacks has surged, necessitating robust defense mechanisms. Among these defenses, methods exploiting low-rank approximations for input data preprocessing and neural network (NN) parameter factorization have shown potential. Our work advances this field further by integrating the tensorization of input data with low-rank decomposition and tensorization of NN parameters to enhance adversarial defense. The proposed approach demonstrates significant defense capabilities, maintaining robust accuracy even when subjected to the strongest known auto-attacks. Evaluations against leading-edge robust performance benchmarks reveal that our results not only hold their ground against the best defensive methods available but also exceed all current defense strategies that rely on tensor factorizations. This study underscores the potential of integrating tensorization and low-rank decomposition as a robust defense against adversarial attacks in machine learning.
The development of accurate and transferable machine learning (ML) potentials for predicting molecular energetics is a challenging task. The process of data generation to train such ML potentials is a task neither well understood nor researched in detail. In this work, we present a fully automated approach for the generation of datasets with the intent of training universal ML potentials. It is based on the concept of active learning (AL) via Query by Committee (QBC), which uses the disagreement between an ensemble of ML potentials to infer the reliability of the ensemble's prediction. QBC allows the presented AL algorithm to automatically sample regions of chemical space where the ML potential fails to accurately predict the potential energy. AL improves the overall fitness of ANAKIN-ME (ANI) deep learning potentials in rigorous test cases by mitigating human biases in deciding what new training data to use. AL also reduces the training set size to a fraction of the data required when using naive random sampling techniques. To provide validation of our AL approach we develop the COMP6 benchmark (publicly available on GitHub), which contains a diverse set of organic molecules. Through the AL process, it is shown that the AL-based potentials perform as well as the ANI-1 potential on COMP6 with only 10% of the data, and vastly outperforms ANI-1 with 25% the amount of data. Finally, we show that our proposed AL technique develops a universal ANI potential (ANI-1x) that provides accurate energy and force predictions on the entire COMP6 benchmark. This universal ML potential achieves a level of accuracy on par with the best ML potentials for single molecule or materials, while remaining applicable to the general class of organic molecules comprised of the elements CHNO.