GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Adversarial Parameter Attack on Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Lijia Yu; Yihan Wang; Xiao-Shan Gao
Venue: ICML 2023 (ICML 2023 Poster)

Abstract: The parameter perturbation attack is a safety threat to deep learning, where small parameter perturbations are made such that the attacked network gives wrong or desired labels of the adversary to specified inputs. However, such attacks could be detected by the user, because the accuracy of the attacked network will reduce and the network cannot work normally. To make the attack more stealthy, in this paper, the adversarial parameter attack is proposed, in which small perturbations to the parameters of the network are made such that the accuracy of the attacked network does not decrease much, but its robustness against adversarial example attacks becomes much lower. As a consequence, the attacked network performs normally on standard samples, but is much more vulnerable to adversarial attacks. The existence of nearly perfect adversarial parameters under $L_\infty$ norm and $L_0$ norm is proved under reasonable conditions. Algorithms are given which can be used to produce high quality adversarial parameters for the commonly used networks trained with various robust training methods, in that the robustness of the attacked networks decreases significantly when they are evaluated using various adversarial attack methods.
AdaNPC: Exploring Non-Parametric Classifier for Test-Time Adaptation
Authors: YiFan Zhang; xue wang; Kexin Jin; Kun Yuan; Zhang Zhang; Liang Wang; Rong Jin; Tieniu Tan
Venue: ICML 2023 (ICML 2023 Poster)

Abstract: Many recent machine learning tasks focus to develop models that can generalize to unseen distributions. Domain generalization (DG) has become one of the key topics in various fields. Several literatures show that DG can be arbitrarily hard without exploiting target domain information. To address this issue, test-time adaptive (TTA) methods are proposed. Existing TTA methods require offline target data or extra sophisticated optimization procedures during the inference stage. In this work, we adopt **N**on-**P**arametric **C**lassifier to perform the test-time **Ada**ptation (**AdaNPC**). In particular, we construct a memory that contains the feature and label pairs from training domains. During inference, given a test instance, AdaNPC first recalls $k$ closed samples from the memory to vote for the prediction, and then the test feature and predicted label are added to the memory. In this way, the sample distribution in the memory can be gradually changed from the training distribution towards the test distribution with very little extra computation cost. We theoretically justify the rationality behind the proposed method. Besides, we test our model on extensive numerical experiments. AdaNPC significantly outperforms competitive baselines on various DG benchmarks. In particular, when the adaptation target is a series of domains, the adaptation accuracy of AdaNPC is $50$% higher than advanced TTA methods.
Tuning Language Models as Training Data Generators for Augmentation-Enhanced Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Yu Meng; Martin Michalski; Jiaxin Huang; Yu Zhang; Tarek Abdelzaher; Jiawei Han
Venue: ICML 2023 (ICML 2023 Poster)

Abstract: Recent studies have revealed the intriguing few-shot learning ability of pretrained language models (PLMs): They can quickly adapt to a new task when fine-tuned on a small amount of labeled data formulated as prompts, without requiring abundant task-specific annotations. Despite their promising performance, most existing few-shot approaches that only learn from the small training set still underperform fully supervised training by nontrivial margins. In this work, we study few-shot learning with PLMs from a different perspective: We first tune an autoregressive PLM on the few-shot samples and then use it as a generator to synthesize a large amount of novel training samples which augment the original training set. To encourage the generator to produce label-discriminative samples, we train it via weighted maximum likelihood where the weight of each token is automatically adjusted based on a discriminative meta-learning objective. A classification PLM can then be fine-tuned on both the few-shot and the synthetic samples with regularization for better generalization and stability. Our approach FewGen achieves an overall better result across seven classification tasks of the GLUE benchmark than existing few-shot learning methods, improving no-augmentation methods by 5+ average points, and outperforming augmentation methods by 3+ average points.
NeuralSlice: Neural 3D Triangle Mesh Reconstruction via Slicing 4D Tetrahedral Meshes
Authors: Chenbo Jiang; Jie Yang; Shwai He; Yu-Kun Lai; Lin Gao
Venue: ICML 2023 (ICML 2023 Poster)

Abstract: Learning-based high-fidelity reconstruction of 3D shapes with varying topology is a fundamental problem in computer vision and computer graphics. Recent advances in learning 3D shapes using explicit and implicit representations have achieved impressive results in 3D modeling. However, the template-based explicit representation is limited by fixed topology, and the implicit representation, although flexible with arbitrary topology, requires a large number of sampled points to regress the surface, which is computationally expensive. In this work, we propose a novel 3D shape representation named NeuralSlice, which represents a 3D shape as the intersection of a 4D tetrahedral mesh and a 4D hyperplane. A novel network is designed to incorporate the proposed representation flexibly, which learns a deformable 4D template and a parameter for slicing 4D hyperplane to reconstruct the 3D object. To learn the local deformation of the 4D template, we further propose a spatial-aware network to locate the 4D points within the 3D feature volume of input shape via positional encoding, which leverages the local geometrical feature to guide the 4D deformation. By addressing the 3D problem in a higher 4D space, our method supports flexible topology changes while being highly efficient. Our method is guaranteed to produce manifold meshes. NeuralSlice outperforms the state-of-the-art explicit-based approaches in terms of reconstruction quality. Compared with implicit approaches, by avoiding point sampling, our method is 10 times faster than the implicit approaches, and better preserves thin structures. NeuralSlice has the capability of representing various shapes and topologies using a single 4D tetrahedral mesh. The corresponding code can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/IGLICT/NEURALSLICE
Over-parametrization via Lifting for Low-rank Matrix Sensing: Conversion of Spurious Solutions to Strict Saddle Points
Authors: Ziye Ma; Igor Molybog; Javad Lavaei; Somayeh Sojoudi
Venue: ICML 2023 (ICML 2023 OralPoster)

Abstract: This paper studies the role of over-parametrization in solving non-convex optimization problems. The focus is on the important class of low-rank matrix sensing, where we propose an infinite hierarchy of non-convex problems via the lifting technique and the Burer-Monteiro factorization. This contrasts with the existing over-parametrization technique where the search rank is limited by the dimension of the matrix and it does not allow a rich over-parametrization of an arbitrary degree. We show that although the spurious solutions of the problem remain stationary points through the hierarchy, they will be transformed into strict saddle points (under some technical conditions) and can be escaped via local search methods. This is the first result in the literature showing that over-parametrization creates a negative curvature for escaping spurious solutions. We also derive a bound on how much over-parametrization is requited to enable the elimination of spurious solutions.
Implicit Regularization Leads to Benign Overfitting for Sparse Linear Regression
Authors: Mo Zhou; Rong Ge
Venue: ICML 2023 (ICML 2023 Poster)

Abstract: In deep learning, often the training process finds an interpolator (a solution with 0 training loss), but the test loss is still low. This phenomenon, known as *benign overfitting*, is a major mystery that received a lot of recent attention. One common mechanism for benign overfitting is *implicit regularization*, where the training process leads to additional properties for the interpolator, often characterized by minimizing certain norms. However, even for a simple sparse linear regression problem $y = \beta^{\ast\top} x +\xi$ with sparse $\beta^{\ast}$, neither minimum $\ell_1$ or $\ell_2$ norm interpolator gives the optimal test loss. In this work, we give a different parametrization of the model which leads to a new implicit regularization effect that combines the benefit of $\ell_1$ and $\ell_2$ interpolators. We show that training our new model via gradient descent leads to an interpolator with near-optimal test loss. Our result is based on careful analysis of the training dynamics and provides another example of implicit regularization effect that goes beyond norm minimization.
Leveraging Offline Data in Online Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Andrew Wagenmaker; Aldo Pacchiano
Venue: ICML 2023 (ICML 2023 Poster)

Abstract: Two central paradigms have emerged in the reinforcement learning (RL) community: online RL and offline RL. In the online RL setting, the agent has no prior knowledge of the environment, and must interact with it in order to find an $\epsilon$-optimal policy. In the offline RL setting, the learner instead has access to a fixed dataset to learn from, but is unable to otherwise interact with the environment, and must obtain the best policy it can from this offline data. Practical scenarios often motivate an intermediate setting: if we have some set of offline data and may also interact with the environment, how can we best use the offline data to minimize the number of online interactions necessary to learn an $\epsilon$-optimal policy. In this work, we consider this setting, which we call the FineTuneRL setting, for MDPs with linear structure. We characterize the necessary number of online samples needed in this setting given access to some offline dataset, and develop an algorithm, FTPedel, which is provably optimal, up to $H$ factors. We show through an explicit example that combining offline data with online interactions can lead to a provable improvement over either purely offline or purely online RL. Finally, our results illustrate the distinction between verifiable learning, the typical setting considered in online RL, and unverifiable learning, the setting often considered in offline RL, and show that there is a formal separation between these regimes.
Fast $(1+\varepsilon)$-Approximation Algorithms for Binary Matrix Factorization
Authors: Ameya Velingker; Maximilian Vötsch; David Woodruff; Samson Zhou
Venue: ICML 2023 (ICML 2023 Poster)

Abstract: We introduce efficient $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithms for the binary matrix factorization (BMF) problem, where the inputs are a matrix $\mathbf{A}\in\{0,1\}^{n\times d}$, a rank parameter $k>0$, as well as an accuracy parameter $\varepsilon>0$, and the goal is to approximate $\mathbf{A}$ as a product of low-rank factors $\mathbf{U}\in\{0,1\}^{n\times k}$ and $\mathbf{V}\in\{0,1\}^{k\times d}$. Equivalently, we want to find $\mathbf{U}$ and $\mathbf{V}$ that minimize the Frobenius loss $\|\mathbf{U}\mathbf{V} - \mathbf{A}\|_F^2$. Before this work, the state-of-the-art for this problem was the approximation algorithm of Kumar et. al. [ICML 2019], which achieves a $C$-approximation for some constant $C\ge 576$. We give the first $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm using running time singly exponential in $k$, where $k$ is typically a small integer. Our techniques generalize to other common variants of the BMF problem, admitting bicriteria $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithms for $L_p$ loss functions and the setting where matrix operations are performed in $\mathbb{F}_2$. Our approach can be implemented in standard big data models, such as the streaming or distributed models.
Pareto Regret Analyses in Multi-objective Multi-armed Bandit
Authors: Mengfan Xu; Diego Klabjan
Venue: ICML 2023 (ICML 2023 Poster)

Abstract: We study Pareto optimality in multi-objective multi-armed bandit by providing a formulation of adversarial multi-objective multi-armed bandit and defining its Pareto regrets that can be applied to both stochastic and adversarial settings. The regrets do not rely on any scalarization functions and reflect Pareto optimality compared to scalarized regrets. We also present new algorithms assuming both with and without prior information of the multi-objective multi-armed bandit setting. The algorithms are shown optimal in adversarial settings and nearly optimal up to a logarithmic factor in stochastic settings simultaneously by our established upper bounds and lower bounds on Pareto regrets. Moreover, the lower bound analyses show that the new regrets are consistent with the existing Pareto regret for stochastic settings and extend an adversarial attack mechanism from bandit to the multi-objective one.
Reinforcement Learning with General Utilities: Simpler Variance Reduction and Large State-Action Space
Authors: Anas Barakat; Ilyas Fatkhullin; Niao He
Venue: ICML 2023 (ICML 2023 Poster)

Abstract: We consider the reinforcement learning (RL) problem with general utilities which consists in maximizing a function of the state-action occupancy measure. Beyond the standard cumulative reward RL setting, this problem includes as particular cases constrained RL, pure exploration and learning from demonstrations among others. For this problem, we propose a simpler single-loop parameter-free normalized policy gradient algorithm. Implementing a recursive momentum variance reduction mechanism, our algorithm achieves $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-3})$ and $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-2})$ sample complexities for $\epsilon$-first-order stationarity and $\epsilon$-global optimality respectively, under adequate assumptions. We further address the setting of large finite state action spaces via linear function approximation of the occupancy measure and show a $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-4})$ sample complexity for a simple policy gradient method with a linear regression subroutine.
Meta Optimal Transport
Authors: Brandon Amos; Giulia Luise; Samuel Cohen; Ievgen Redko
Venue: ICML 2023 (ICML 2023 Poster)

Abstract: We study the use of amortized optimization to predict optimal transport (OT) maps from the input measures, which we call Meta OT. This helps repeatedly solve similar OT problems between different measures by leveraging the knowledge and information present from past problems to rapidly predict and solve new problems. Otherwise, standard methods ignore the knowledge of the past solutions and suboptimally re-solve each problem from scratch. We instantiate Meta OT models in discrete and continuous settings between grayscale images, spherical data, classification labels, and color palettes and use them to improve the computational time of standard OT solvers. Our source code is available at http://github.com/facebookresearch/meta-ot
Hyperbolic Image-text Representations
Authors: Karan Desai; Maximilian Nickel; Tanmay Rajpurohit; Justin Johnson; Shanmukha Ramakrishna Vedantam
Venue: ICML 2023 (ICML 2023 Poster)

Abstract: Visual and linguistic concepts naturally organize themselves in a hierarchy, where a textual concept "dog" entails all images that contain dogs. Despite being intuitive, current large-scale vision and language models such as CLIP do not explicitly capture such hierarchy. We propose MERU, a contrastive model that yields hyperbolic representations of images and text. Hyperbolic spaces have suitable geometric properties to embed tree-like data, so MERU can better capture the underlying hierarchy in image-text datasets. Our results show that MERU learns a highly interpretable and structured representation space while being competitive with CLIP's performance on standard multi-modal tasks like image classification and image-text retrieval.
LongCoder: A Long-Range Pre-trained Language Model for Code Completion
Authors: Daya Guo; Canwen Xu; Nan Duan; Jian Yin; Julian McAuley
Venue: ICML 2023 (ICML 2023 Poster)

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a new task for code completion that focuses on handling long code input and propose a sparse Transformer model, called LongCoder, to address this task. LongCoder employs a sliding window mechanism for self-attention and introduces two types of globally accessible tokens - bridge tokens and memory tokens - to improve performance and efficiency. Bridge tokens are inserted throughout the input sequence to aggregate local information and facilitate global interaction, while memory tokens are included to highlight important statements that may be invoked later and need to be memorized, such as package imports and definitions of classes, functions, or structures. We conduct experiments on a newly constructed dataset that contains longer code context and the publicly available CodeXGLUE benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that LongCoder achieves superior performance on code completion tasks compared to previous models while maintaining comparable efficiency in terms of computational resources during inference.
Which is Better for Learning with Noisy Labels: The Semi-supervised Method or Modeling Label Noise?
Authors: Yu Yao; Mingming Gong; Yuxuan Du; Jun Yu; Bo Han; Kun Zhang; Tongliang Liu
Venue: ICML 2023 (ICML 2023 Poster)

Abstract: In real life, accurately annotating large-scale datasets is sometimes difficult. Datasets used for training deep learning models are likely to contain label noise. To make use of the dataset containing label noise, two typical methods have been proposed. One is to employ the semi-supervised method by exploiting labeled *confident examples* and unlabeled *unconfident examples*. The other one is to *model label noise* and design *statistically consistent* classifiers. A natural question remains unsolved: which one should be used for a specific real-world application? In this paper, we answer the question from the perspective of *causal data generative process*. Specifically, the performance of the semi-supervised based method depends heavily on the data generative process while the method modeling label-noise is not influenced by the generation process. For example, for a given dataset, if it has a causal generative structure that the features cause the label, the semi-supervised based method would not be helpful. When the causal structure is unknown, we provide an intuitive method to discover the causal structure for a given dataset containing label noise.
Surface Snapping Optimization Layer for Single Image Object Shape Reconstruction
Authors: Yuan-Ting Hu; Alex Schwing; Raymond A. Yeh
Venue: ICML 2023 (ICML 2023 Poster)

Abstract: Reconstructing the 3D shape of objects observed in a single image is a challenging task. Recent approaches rely on visual cues extracted from a given image learned from a deep net. In this work, we leverage recent advances in monocular scene understanding to incorporate an additional geometric cue of surface normals. For this, we proposed a novel optimization layer that encourages the face normals of the reconstructed shape to be aligned with estimated surface normals. We develop a computationally efficient conjugate-gradient-based method that avoids the computation of a high-dimensional sparse matrix. We show this framework to achieve compelling shape reconstruction results on the challenging Pix3D and ShapeNet datasets.
A Closer Look at Self-Supervised Lightweight Vision Transformers
Authors: Shaoru Wang; Jin Gao; Zeming Li; Xiaoqin Zhang; Weiming Hu
Venue: ICML 2023 (ICML 2023 Poster)

Abstract: Self-supervised learning on large-scale Vision Transformers (ViTs) as pre-training methods has achieved promising downstream performance. Yet, how much these pre-training paradigms promote lightweight ViTs' performance is considerably less studied. In this work, we develop and benchmark several self-supervised pre-training methods on image classification tasks and some downstream dense prediction tasks. We surprisingly find that if proper pre-training is adopted, even vanilla lightweight ViTs show comparable performance to previous SOTA networks with delicate architecture design. It breaks the recently popular conception that vanilla ViTs are not suitable for vision tasks in lightweight regimes. We also point out some defects of such pre-training, e.g., failing to benefit from large-scale pre-training data and showing inferior performance on data-insufficient downstream tasks. Furthermore, we analyze and clearly show the effect of such pre-training by analyzing the properties of the layer representation and attention maps for related models. Finally, based on the above analyses, a distillation strategy during pre-training is developed, which leads to further downstream performance improvement for MAE-based pre-training. Code is available at https://github.com/wangsr126/mae-lite.
NP-SemiSeg: When Neural Processes meet Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Jianfeng Wang; Daniela Massiceti; Xiaolin Hu; Vladimir Pavlovic; Thomas Lukasiewicz
Venue: ICML 2023 (ICML 2023 Poster)

Abstract: Semi-supervised semantic segmentation involves assigning pixel-wise labels to unlabeled images at training time. This is useful in a wide range of real-world applications where collecting pixel-wise labels is not feasible in time or cost. Current approaches to semi-supervised semantic segmentation work by predicting pseudo-labels for each pixel from a class-wise probability distribution output by a model. If this predicted probability distribution is incorrect, however, it leads to poor segmentation results which can have knock-on consequences in safety critical systems, like medical images or self-driving cars. It is, therefore, important to understand what a model does not know, which is mainly achieved by uncertainty quantification. Recently, neural processes (NPs) have been explored in semi-supervised image classification, and they have been a computationally efficient and effective method for uncertainty quantification. In this work, we move one step forward by adapting NPs to semi-supervised semantic segmentation, resulting in a new model called NP-SemiSeg. We experimentally evaluated NP-SemiSeg on the public benchmarks PASCAL VOC 2012 and Cityscapes, with different training settings, and the results verify its effectiveness.
A Critical Revisit of Adversarial Robustness in 3D Point Cloud Recognition with Diffusion-Driven Purification
Authors: Jiachen Sun; Jiongxiao Wang; Weili Nie; Zhiding Yu; Zhuoqing Mao; Chaowei Xiao
Venue: ICML 2023 (ICML 2023 Poster)

Abstract: 3D point clouds serve as a crucial data representation in numerous real-world applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and medical imaging. While the advancements in deep learning have spurred the utilization of 3D point clouds, deep models are notoriously vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Various defense solutions have been proposed to build robust models against adversarial attacks. In this work, we pinpoint a major limitation of the leading empirical defense, adversarial training, when applied to 3D point cloud models: gradient obfuscation, which significantly hampers robustness against potent attacks. To bridge the gap, we propose PointDP, a purification strategy that leverages diffusion models to defend against 3D adversarial attacks. Since PointDP does not rely on predefined adversarial examples for training, it can defend against a variety of threats. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of PointDP across six representative 3D point cloud architectures, employing sixteen strong and adaptive attacks to manifest its foundational robustness. Our evaluation shows that PointDP achieves significantly better (i.e., 12.6%-40.3%) adversarial robustness than state-of-the-art methods under strong attacks bounded by different $\ell_p$ norms.