An Exploratory Study of AI System Risk Assessment from the Lens of Data Distribution and Uncertainty

Deep learning (DL) has become a driving force and has been widely adopted in many domains and applications with competitive performance. In practice, to solve the nontrivial and complicated tasks in real-world applications, DL is often not used standalone, but instead contributes as a piece of gadget of a larger complex AI system. Although there comes a fast increasing trend to study the quality issues of deep neural networks (DNNs) at the model level, few studies have been performed to investigate the quality of DNNs at both the unit level and the potential impacts on the system level. More importantly, it also lacks systematic investigation on how to perform the risk assessment for AI systems from unit level to system level. To bridge this gap, this paper initiates an early exploratory study of AI system risk assessment from both the data distribution and uncertainty angles to address these issues. We propose a general framework with an exploratory study for analyzing AI systems. After large-scale (700+ experimental configurations and 5000+ GPU hours) experiments and in-depth investigations, we reached a few key interesting findings that highlight the practical need and opportunities for more in-depth investigations into AI systems.

Verifying Attention Robustness of Deep Neural Networks against Semantic Perturbations

It is known that deep neural networks (DNNs) classify an input image by paying particular attention to certain specific pixels; a graphical representation of the magnitude of attention to each pixel is called a saliency-map. Saliency-maps are used to check the validity of the classification decision basis, e.g., it is not a valid basis for classification if a DNN pays more attention to the background rather than the subject of an image. Semantic perturbations can significantly change the saliency-map. In this work, we propose the first verification method for attention robustness, i.e., the local robustness of the changes in the saliency-map against combinations of semantic perturbations. Specifically, our method determines the range of the perturbation parameters (e.g., the brightness change) that maintains the difference between the actual saliency-map change and the expected saliency-map change below a given threshold value. Our method is based on activation region traversals, focusing on the outermost robust boundary for scalability on larger DNNs. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can show the extent to which DNNs can classify with the same basis regardless of semantic perturbations and report on performance and performance factors of activation region traversals.