Distilling from Vision-Language Models for Improved OOD Generalization in Vision Tasks

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP are trained on large amounts of image-text pairs, resulting in remarkable generalization across several data distributions. The prohibitively expensive training and data collection/curation costs of these models make them valuable Intellectual Property (IP) for organizations. This motivates a vendor-client paradigm, where a vendor trains a large-scale VLM and grants only input-output access to clients on a pay-per-query basis in a black-box setting. The client aims to minimize inference cost by distilling the VLM to a student model using the limited available task-specific data, and further deploying this student model in the downstream application. While naive distillation largely improves the In-Domain (ID) accuracy of the student, it fails to transfer the superior out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of the VLM teacher using the limited available labeled images. To mitigate this, we propose Vision-Language to Vision-Align, Distill, Predict (VL2V-ADiP), which first aligns the vision and language modalities of the teacher model with the vision modality of a pre-trained student model, and further distills the aligned VLM embeddings to the student. This maximally retains the pre-trained features of the student, while also incorporating the rich representations of the VLM image encoder and the superior generalization of the text embeddings. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the standard Domain Generalization benchmarks in a black-box teacher setting, and also when weights of the VLM are accessible.

Boosting Adversarial Robustness using Feature Level Stochastic Smoothing

Advances in adversarial defenses have led to a significant improvement in the robustness of Deep Neural Networks. However, the robust accuracy of present state-ofthe-art defenses is far from the requirements in critical applications such as robotics and autonomous navigation systems. Further, in practical use cases, network prediction alone might not suffice, and assignment of a confidence value for the prediction can prove crucial. In this work, we propose a generic method for introducing stochasticity in the network predictions, and utilize this for smoothing decision boundaries and rejecting low confidence predictions, thereby boosting the robustness on accepted samples. The proposed Feature Level Stochastic Smoothing based classification also results in a boost in robustness without rejection over existing adversarial training methods. Finally, we combine the proposed method with adversarial detection methods, to achieve the benefits of both approaches.

Certified Adversarial Robustness Within Multiple Perturbation Bounds

Randomized smoothing (RS) is a well known certified defense against adversarial attacks, which creates a smoothed classifier by predicting the most likely class under random noise perturbations of inputs during inference. While initial work focused on robustness to $\ell_2$ norm perturbations using noise sampled from a Gaussian distribution, subsequent works have shown that different noise distributions can result in robustness to other $\ell_p$ norm bounds as well. In general, a specific noise distribution is optimal for defending against a given $\ell_p$ norm based attack. In this work, we aim to improve the certified adversarial robustness against multiple perturbation bounds simultaneously. Towards this, we firstly present a novel \textit{certification scheme}, that effectively combines the certificates obtained using different noise distributions to obtain optimal results against multiple perturbation bounds. We further propose a novel \textit{training noise distribution} along with a \textit{regularized training scheme} to improve the certification within both $\ell_1$ and $\ell_2$ perturbation norms simultaneously. Contrary to prior works, we compare the certified robustness of different training algorithms across the same natural (clean) accuracy, rather than across fixed noise levels used for training and certification. We also empirically invalidate the argument that training and certifying the classifier with the same amount of noise gives the best results. The proposed approach achieves improvements on the ACR (Average Certified Radius) metric across both $\ell_1$ and $\ell_2$ perturbation bounds.

DART: Diversify-Aggregate-Repeat Training Improves Generalization of Neural Networks

Generalization of neural networks is crucial for deploying them safely in the real world. Common training strategies to improve generalization involve the use of data augmentations, ensembling and model averaging. In this work, we first establish a surprisingly simple but strong benchmark for generalization which utilizes diverse augmentations within a training minibatch, and show that this can learn a more balanced distribution of features. Further, we propose Diversify-Aggregate-Repeat Training (DART) strategy that first trains diverse models using different augmentations (or domains) to explore the loss basin, and further Aggregates their weights to combine their expertise and obtain improved generalization. We find that Repeating the step of Aggregation throughout training improves the overall optimization trajectory and also ensures that the individual models have a sufficiently low loss barrier to obtain improved generalization on combining them. We shed light on our approach by casting it in the framework proposed by Shen et al. and theoretically show that it indeed generalizes better. In addition to improvements in In- Domain generalization, we demonstrate SOTA performance on the Domain Generalization benchmarks in the popular DomainBed framework as well. Our method is generic and can easily be integrated with several base training algorithms to achieve performance gains.

Efficient and Effective Augmentation Strategy for Adversarial Training

Adversarial training of Deep Neural Networks is known to be significantly more data-hungry when compared to standard training. Furthermore, complex data augmentations such as AutoAugment, which have led to substantial gains in standard training of image classifiers, have not been successful with Adversarial Training. We first explain this contrasting behavior by viewing augmentation during training as a problem of domain generalization, and further propose Diverse Augmentation-based Joint Adversarial Training (DAJAT) to use data augmentations effectively in adversarial training. We aim to handle the conflicting goals of enhancing the diversity of the training dataset and training with data that is close to the test distribution by using a combination of simple and complex augmentations with separate batch normalization layers during training. We further utilize the popular Jensen-Shannon divergence loss to encourage the joint learning of the diverse augmentations, thereby allowing simple augmentations to guide the learning of complex ones. Lastly, to improve the computational efficiency of the proposed method, we propose and utilize a two-step defense, Ascending Constraint Adversarial Training (ACAT), that uses an increasing epsilon schedule and weight-space smoothing to prevent gradient masking. The proposed method DAJAT achieves substantially better robustness-accuracy trade-off when compared to existing methods on the RobustBench Leaderboard on ResNet-18 and WideResNet-34-10. The code for implementing DAJAT is available here: https://github.com/val-iisc/DAJAT.

Towards Efficient and Effective Self-Supervised Learning of Visual Representations

Self-supervision has emerged as a propitious method for visual representation learning after the recent paradigm shift from handcrafted pretext tasks to instance-similarity based approaches. Most state-of-the-art methods enforce similarity between various augmentations of a given image, while some methods additionally use contrastive approaches to explicitly ensure diverse representations. While these approaches have indeed shown promising direction, they require a significantly larger number of training iterations when compared to the supervised counterparts. In this work, we explore reasons for the slow convergence of these methods, and further propose to strengthen them using well-posed auxiliary tasks that converge significantly faster, and are also useful for representation learning. The proposed method utilizes the task of rotation prediction to improve the efficiency of existing state-of-the-art methods. We demonstrate significant gains in performance using the proposed method on multiple datasets, specifically for lower training epochs.

Scaling Adversarial Training to Large Perturbation Bounds

The vulnerability of Deep Neural Networks to Adversarial Attacks has fuelled research towards building robust models. While most Adversarial Training algorithms aim at defending attacks constrained within low magnitude Lp norm bounds, real-world adversaries are not limited by such constraints. In this work, we aim to achieve adversarial robustness within larger bounds, against perturbations that may be perceptible, but do not change human (or Oracle) prediction. The presence of images that flip Oracle predictions and those that do not makes this a challenging setting for adversarial robustness. We discuss the ideal goals of an adversarial defense algorithm beyond perceptual limits, and further highlight the shortcomings of naively extending existing training algorithms to higher perturbation bounds. In order to overcome these shortcomings, we propose a novel defense, Oracle-Aligned Adversarial Training (OA-AT), to align the predictions of the network with that of an Oracle during adversarial training. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance at large epsilon bounds (such as an L-inf bound of 16/255 on CIFAR-10) while outperforming existing defenses (AWP, TRADES, PGD-AT) at standard bounds (8/255) as well.

Learning an Invertible Output Mapping Can Mitigate Simplicity Bias in Neural Networks

Deep Neural Networks are known to be brittle to even minor distribution shifts compared to the training distribution. While one line of work has demonstrated that Simplicity Bias (SB) of DNNs - bias towards learning only the simplest features - is a key reason for this brittleness, another recent line of work has surprisingly found that diverse/ complex features are indeed learned by the backbone, and their brittleness is due to the linear classification head relying primarily on the simplest features. To bridge the gap between these two lines of work, we first hypothesize and verify that while SB may not altogether preclude learning complex features, it amplifies simpler features over complex ones. Namely, simple features are replicated several times in the learned representations while complex features might not be replicated. This phenomenon, we term Feature Replication Hypothesis, coupled with the Implicit Bias of SGD to converge to maximum margin solutions in the feature space, leads the models to rely mostly on the simple features for classification. To mitigate this bias, we propose Feature Reconstruction Regularizer (FRR) to ensure that the learned features can be reconstructed back from the logits. The use of {\em FRR} in linear layer training (FRR-L) encourages the use of more diverse features for classification. We further propose to finetune the full network by freezing the weights of the linear layer trained using FRR-L, to refine the learned features, making them more suitable for classification. Using this simple solution, we demonstrate up to 15% gains in OOD accuracy on the recently introduced semi-synthetic datasets with extreme distribution shifts. Moreover, we demonstrate noteworthy gains over existing SOTA methods on the standard OOD benchmark DomainBed as well.

DAFT: Distilling Adversarially Fine-tuned Models for Better OOD Generalization

We consider the problem of OOD generalization, where the goal is to train a model that performs well on test distributions that are different from the training distribution. Deep learning models are known to be fragile to such shifts and can suffer large accuracy drops even for slightly different test distributions. We propose a new method - DAFT - based on the intuition that adversarially robust combination of a large number of rich features should provide OOD robustness. Our method carefully distills the knowledge from a powerful teacher that learns several discriminative features using standard training while combining them using adversarial training. The standard adversarial training procedure is modified to produce teachers which can guide the student better. We evaluate DAFT on standard benchmarks in the DomainBed framework, and demonstrate that DAFT achieves significant improvements over the current state-of-the-art OOD generalization methods. DAFT consistently out-performs well-tuned ERM and distillation baselines by up to 6%, with more pronounced gains for smaller networks.

Towards Data-Free Model Stealing in a Hard Label Setting

Machine learning models deployed as a service (MLaaS) are susceptible to model stealing attacks, where an adversary attempts to steal the model within a restricted access framework. While existing attacks demonstrate near-perfect clone-model performance using softmax predictions of the classification network, most of the APIs allow access to only the top-1 labels. In this work, we show that it is indeed possible to steal Machine Learning models by accessing only top-1 predictions (Hard Label setting) as well, without access to model gradients (Black-Box setting) or even the training dataset (Data-Free setting) within a low query budget. We propose a novel GAN-based framework that trains the student and generator in tandem to steal the model effectively while overcoming the challenge of the hard label setting by utilizing gradients of the clone network as a proxy to the victim's gradients. We propose to overcome the large query costs associated with a typical Data-Free setting by utilizing publicly available (potentially unrelated) datasets as a weak image prior. We additionally show that even in the absence of such data, it is possible to achieve state-of-the-art results within a low query budget using synthetically crafted samples. We are the first to demonstrate the scalability of Model Stealing in a restricted access setting on a 100 class dataset as well.