Knowledge Pursuit Prompting for Zero-Shot Multimodal Synthesis

Hallucinations and unfaithful synthesis due to inaccurate prompts with insufficient semantic details are widely observed in multimodal generative models. A prevalent strategy to align multiple modalities is to fine-tune the generator with a large number of annotated text-image pairs. However, such a procedure is labor-consuming and resource-draining. The key question we ask is: can we enhance the quality and faithfulness of text-driven generative models beyond extensive text-image pair annotations? To address this question, we propose Knowledge Pursuit Prompting (KPP), a zero-shot framework that iteratively incorporates external knowledge to help generators produce reliable visual content. Instead of training generators to handle generic prompts, KPP employs a recursive knowledge query process to gather informative external facts from the knowledge base, instructs a language model to compress the acquired knowledge for prompt refinement, and utilizes text-driven generators for visual synthesis. The entire process is zero-shot, without accessing the architectures and parameters of generative models. We evaluate the framework across multiple text-driven generative tasks (image, 3D rendering, and video) on datasets of different domains. We further demonstrate the extensibility and adaptability of KPP through varying foundation model bases and instructions. Our results show that KPP is capable of generating faithful and semantically rich content across diverse visual domains, offering a promising solution to improve multimodal generative models.

Zero-shot Model Diagnosis

When it comes to deploying deep vision models, the behavior of these systems must be explicable to ensure confidence in their reliability and fairness. A common approach to evaluate deep learning models is to build a labeled test set with attributes of interest and assess how well it performs. However, creating a balanced test set (i.e., one that is uniformly sampled over all the important traits) is often time-consuming, expensive, and prone to mistakes. The question we try to address is: can we evaluate the sensitivity of deep learning models to arbitrary visual attributes without an annotated test set? This paper argues the case that Zero-shot Model Diagnosis (ZOOM) is possible without the need for a test set nor labeling. To avoid the need for test sets, our system relies on a generative model and CLIP. The key idea is enabling the user to select a set of prompts (relevant to the problem) and our system will automatically search for semantic counterfactual images (i.e., synthesized images that flip the prediction in the case of a binary classifier) using the generative model. We evaluate several visual tasks (classification, key-point detection, and segmentation) in multiple visual domains to demonstrate the viability of our methodology. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is capable of producing counterfactual images and offering sensitivity analysis for model diagnosis without the need for a test set.

Semantic Image Attack for Visual Model Diagnosis

In practice, metric analysis on a specific train and test dataset does not guarantee reliable or fair ML models. This is partially due to the fact that obtaining a balanced, diverse, and perfectly labeled dataset is typically expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone. Rather than relying on a carefully designed test set to assess ML models' failures, fairness, or robustness, this paper proposes Semantic Image Attack (SIA), a method based on the adversarial attack that provides semantic adversarial images to allow model diagnosis, interpretability, and robustness. Traditional adversarial training is a popular methodology for robustifying ML models against attacks. However, existing adversarial methods do not combine the two aspects that enable the interpretation and analysis of the model's flaws: semantic traceability and perceptual quality. SIA combines the two features via iterative gradient ascent on a predefined semantic attribute space and the image space. We illustrate the validity of our approach in three scenarios for keypoint detection and classification. (1) Model diagnosis: SIA generates a histogram of attributes that highlights the semantic vulnerability of the ML model (i.e., attributes that make the model fail). (2) Stronger attacks: SIA generates adversarial examples with visually interpretable attributes that lead to higher attack success rates than baseline methods. The adversarial training on SIA improves the transferable robustness across different gradient-based attacks. (3) Robustness to imbalanced datasets: we use SIA to augment the underrepresented classes, which outperforms strong augmentation and re-balancing baselines.

Inconspicuous Adversarial Patches for Fooling Image Recognition Systems on Mobile Devices

Deep learning based image recognition systems have been widely deployed on mobile devices in today's world. In recent studies, however, deep learning models are shown vulnerable to adversarial examples. One variant of adversarial examples, called adversarial patch, draws researchers' attention due to its strong attack abilities. Though adversarial patches achieve high attack success rates, they are easily being detected because of the visual inconsistency between the patches and the original images. Besides, it usually requires a large amount of data for adversarial patch generation in the literature, which is computationally expensive and time-consuming. To tackle these challenges, we propose an approach to generate inconspicuous adversarial patches with one single image. In our approach, we first decide the patch locations basing on the perceptual sensitivity of victim models, then produce adversarial patches in a coarse-to-fine way by utilizing multiple-scale generators and discriminators. The patches are encouraged to be consistent with the background images with adversarial training while preserving strong attack abilities. Our approach shows the strong attack abilities in white-box settings and the excellent transferability in black-box settings through extensive experiments on various models with different architectures and training methods. Compared to other adversarial patches, our adversarial patches hold the most negligible risks to be detected and can evade human observations, which is supported by the illustrations of saliency maps and results of user evaluations. Lastly, we show that our adversarial patches can be applied in the physical world.

Recent Advances in Adversarial Training for Adversarial Robustness

Adversarial training is one of the most effective approaches defending against adversarial examples for deep learning models. Unlike other defense strategies, adversarial training aims to promote the robustness of models intrinsically. During the last few years, adversarial training has been studied and discussed from various aspects. A variety of improvements and developments of adversarial training are proposed, which were, however, neglected in existing surveys. For the first time in this survey, we systematically review the recent progress on adversarial training for adversarial robustness with a novel taxonomy. Then we discuss the generalization problems in adversarial training from three perspectives. Finally, we highlight the challenges which are not fully tackled and present potential future directions.

Recent Advances in Understanding Adversarial Robustness of Deep Neural Networks

Adversarial examples are inevitable on the road of pervasive applications of deep neural networks (DNN). Imperceptible perturbations applied on natural samples can lead DNN-based classifiers to output wrong prediction with fair confidence score. It is increasingly important to obtain models with high robustness that are resistant to adversarial examples. In this paper, we survey recent advances in how to understand such intriguing property, i.e. adversarial robustness, from different perspectives. We give preliminary definitions on what adversarial attacks and robustness are. After that, we study frequently-used benchmarks and mention theoretically-proved bounds for adversarial robustness. We then provide an overview on analyzing correlations among adversarial robustness and other critical indicators of DNN models. Lastly, we introduce recent arguments on potential costs of adversarial training which have attracted wide attention from the research community.

Generating Adversarial yet Inconspicuous Patches with a Single Image

Deep neural networks have been shown vulnerable toadversarial patches, where exotic patterns can resultin models wrong prediction. Nevertheless, existing ap-proaches to adversarial patch generation hardly con-sider the contextual consistency between patches andthe image background, causing such patches to be eas-ily detected and adversarial attacks to fail. On the otherhand, these methods require a large amount of data fortraining, which is computationally expensive. To over-come these challenges, we propose an approach to gen-erate adversarial yet inconspicuous patches with onesingle image. In our approach, adversarial patches areproduced in a coarse-to-fine way with multiple scalesof generators and discriminators. Contextual informa-tion is encoded during the Min-Max training to makepatches consistent with surroundings. The selection ofpatch location is based on the perceptual sensitivity ofvictim models. Through extensive experiments, our ap-proach shows strong attacking ability in both the white-box and black-box setting. Experiments on saliency de-tection and user evaluation indicate that our adversar-ial patches can evade human observations, demonstratethe inconspicuousness of our approach. Lastly, we showthat our approach preserves the attack ability in thephysical world.