F$^2$AT: Feature-Focusing Adversarial Training via Disentanglement of Natural and Perturbed Patterns

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial examples crafted by well-designed perturbations. This could lead to disastrous results on critical applications such as self-driving cars, surveillance security, and medical diagnosis. At present, adversarial training is one of the most effective defenses against adversarial examples. However, traditional adversarial training makes it difficult to achieve a good trade-off between clean accuracy and robustness since spurious features are still learned by DNNs. The intrinsic reason is that traditional adversarial training makes it difficult to fully learn core features from adversarial examples when adversarial noise and clean examples cannot be disentangled. In this paper, we disentangle the adversarial examples into natural and perturbed patterns by bit-plane slicing. We assume the higher bit-planes represent natural patterns and the lower bit-planes represent perturbed patterns, respectively. We propose a Feature-Focusing Adversarial Training (F$^2$AT), which differs from previous work in that it enforces the model to focus on the core features from natural patterns and reduce the impact of spurious features from perturbed patterns. The experimental results demonstrated that F$^2$AT outperforms state-of-the-art methods in clean accuracy and adversarial robustness.

Differentiable Retrieval Augmentation via Generative Language Modeling for E-commerce Query Intent Classification

Retrieval augmentation, which enhances downstream models by a knowledge retriever and an external corpus instead of by merely increasing the number of model parameters, has been successfully applied to many natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as text classification, question answering and so on. However, existing methods that separately or asynchronously train the retriever and downstream model mainly due to the non-differentiability between the two parts, usually lead to degraded performance compared to end-to-end joint training. In this paper, we propose Differentiable Retrieval Augmentation via Generative lANguage modeling(Dragan), to address this problem by a novel differentiable reformulation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on a challenging NLP task in e-commerce search, namely query intent classification. Both the experimental results and ablation study show that the proposed method significantly and reasonably improves the state-of-the-art baselines on both offline evaluation and online A/B test.

Controlling Commercial Cooling Systems Using Reinforcement Learning

This paper is a technical overview of DeepMind and Google's recent work on reinforcement learning for controlling commercial cooling systems. Building on expertise that began with cooling Google's data centers more efficiently, we recently conducted live experiments on two real-world facilities in partnership with Trane Technologies, a building management system provider. These live experiments had a variety of challenges in areas such as evaluation, learning from offline data, and constraint satisfaction. Our paper describes these challenges in the hope that awareness of them will benefit future applied RL work. We also describe the way we adapted our RL system to deal with these challenges, resulting in energy savings of approximately 9% and 13% respectively at the two live experiment sites.

Pre-training Tasks for User Intent Detection and Embedding Retrieval in E-commerce Search

BERT-style models pre-trained on the general corpus (e.g., Wikipedia) and fine-tuned on specific task corpus, have recently emerged as breakthrough techniques in many NLP tasks: question answering, text classification, sequence labeling and so on. However, this technique may not always work, especially for two scenarios: a corpus that contains very different text from the general corpus Wikipedia, or a task that learns embedding spacial distribution for a specific purpose (e.g., approximate nearest neighbor search). In this paper, to tackle the above two scenarios that we have encountered in an industrial e-commerce search system, we propose customized and novel pre-training tasks for two critical modules: user intent detection and semantic embedding retrieval. The customized pre-trained models after fine-tuning, being less than 10% of BERT-base's size in order to be feasible for cost-efficient CPU serving, significantly improve the other baseline models: 1) no pre-training model and 2) fine-tuned model from the official pre-trained BERT using general corpus, on both offline datasets and online system. We have open sourced our datasets for the sake of reproducibility and future works.