huashen218/convxai-cia-dataset huggingface dataset:
Attacking deep networks with surrogate-based adversarial black-box methods is easy
Keywords: adversarial attacks, black-box attacks, network robustness, network analysis

A recent line of work on black-box adversarial attacks has revived the use of transfer from surrogate models by integrating it into query-based search. However, we find that existing approaches of this type underperform their potential, and can be overly complicated besides. Here, we provide a short and simple algorithm which achieves state-of-the-art results through a search which uses the surrogate network's class-score gradients, with no need for other priors or heuristics. The guiding assumption of the algorithm is that the studied networks are in a fundamental sense learning similar functions, and that a transfer attack from one to the other should thus be fairly "easy". This assumption is validated by the extremely low query counts and failure rates achieved: e.g. an untargeted attack on a VGG-16 ImageNet network using a ResNet-152 as the surrogate yields a median query count of 6 at a success rate of 99.9%. Code is available at https://github.com/fiveai/GFCS.
Autoregressive Diffusion Models
Keywords: diffusion, autoregressive models, lossless compression

We introduce Autoregressive Diffusion Models (ARDMs), a model class encompassing and generalizing order-agnostic autoregressive models (Uria et al., 2014) and absorbing discrete diffusion (Austin et al., 2021), which we show are special cases of ARDMs under mild assumptions. ARDMs are simple to implement and easy to train. Unlike standard ARMs, they do not require causal masking of model representations, and can be trained using an efficient objective similar to modern probabilistic diffusion models that scales favourably to highly-dimensional data. At test time, ARDMs support parallel generation which can be adapted to fit any given generation budget. We find that ARDMs require significantly fewer steps than discrete diffusion models to attain the same performance. Finally, we apply ARDMs to lossless compression, and show that they are uniquely suited to this task. Contrary to existing approaches based on bits-back coding, ARDMs obtain compelling results not only on complete datasets, but also on compressing single data points. Moreover, this can be done using a modest number of network calls for (de)compression due to the model's adaptable parallel generation.
Auto-scaling Vision Transformers without Training
Keywords: vision transformer, neural architecture search, training-free search, efficient training

This work targets automated designing and scaling of Vision Transformers (ViTs). The motivation comes from two pain spots: 1) the lack of efficient and principled methods for designing and scaling ViTs; 2) the tremendous computational cost of training ViT that is much heavier than its convolution counterpart. To tackle these issues, we propose As-ViT, an auto-scaling framework for ViTs without training, which automatically discovers and scales up ViTs in an efficient and principled manner. Specifically, we first design a "seed" ViT topology by leveraging a training-free search process. This extremely fast search is fulfilled by a comprehensive study of ViT's network complexity, yielding a strong Kendall-tau correlation with ground-truth accuracies. Second, starting from the "seed" topology, we automate the scaling rule for ViTs by growing widths/depths to different ViT layers. This results in a series of architectures with different numbers of parameters in a single run. Finally, based on the observation that ViTs can tolerate coarse tokenization in early training stages, we propose a progressive tokenization strategy to train ViTs faster and cheaper. As a unified framework, As-ViT achieves strong performance on classification (83.5% top1 on ImageNet-1k) and detection (52.7% mAP on COCO) without any manual crafting nor scaling of ViT architectures: the end-to-end model design and scaling process costs only 12 hours on one V100 GPU. Our code is available at https://github.com/VITA-Group/AsViT.
Fine-grained Differentiable Physics: A Yarn-level Model for Fabrics

Differentiable physics modeling combines physics models with gradient-based learning to provide model explicability and data efficiency. It has been used to learn dynamics, solve inverse problems and facilitate design, and is at its inception of impact. Current successes have concentrated on general physics models such as rigid bodies, deformable sheets, etc, assuming relatively simple structures and forces. Their granularity is intrinsically coarse and therefore incapable of modelling complex physical phenomena. Fine-grained models are still to be developed to incorporate sophisticated material structures and force interactions with gradient-based learning. Following this motivation, we propose a new differentiable fabrics model for composite materials such as cloths, where we dive into the granularity of yarns and model individual yarn physics and yarn-to-yarn interactions. To this end, we propose several differentiable forces, whose counterparts in empirical physics are indifferentiable, to facilitate gradient-based learning. These forces, albeit applied to cloths, are ubiquitous in various physical systems. Through comprehensive evaluation and comparison, we demonstrate our model's $\textit{explicability}$ in learning meaningful physical parameters, $\textit{versatility}$ in incorporating complex physical structures and heterogeneous materials, $\textit{data-efficiency}$ in learning, and $\textit{high-fidelity}$ in capturing subtle dynamics.
Revisiting flow generative models for Out-of-distribution detection
Keywords: flow models, out-of-distribution detection, random projection, distribution comparison

Deep generative models have been widely used in practical applications such as the detection of out-of-distribution (OOD) data. In this work,  we aim to re-examine the potential of generative flow models in OOD detection. We first propose a simple combination of univariate one-sample statistical test (e.g., Kolmogorov-Smirnov) and random projections in the latent space of flow models to perform OOD detection.  Then, we propose a two-sample version of our test to account for imperfect flow models. Quite distinctly, our method does not pose parametric assumptions on OOD data and is capable of exploiting any flow model. Experimentally, firstly we confirm the efficacy of our method against state-of-the-art baselines through extensive experiments on several image datasets; secondly we investigate the relationship between model accuracy (e.g., the generation quality) and the OOD detection performance, and found surprisingly that they are not always positively correlated; and thirdly we show that detection in the latent space of flow models generally outperforms detection in the sample space across various OOD datasets, hence highlighting the benefits of training a flow model.
Missingness Bias in Model Debugging
Keywords: model debugging, vision transformers, missingness

Missingness, or the absence of features from an input, is a concept fundamental to many model debugging tools. However, in computer vision, pixels cannot simply be removed from an image. One thus tends to resort to heuristics such as blacking out pixels, which may in turn introduce bias into the debugging process. We study such biases and, in particular, show how transformer-based architectures can enable a more natural implementation of missingness, which side-steps these issues and improves the reliability of model debugging in practice.
Meta Learning Low Rank Covariance Factors for Energy Based Deterministic Uncertainty
Keywords: calibration, meta-learning

Numerous recent works utilize bi-Lipschitz regularization of neural network layers to preserve relative distances between data instances in the feature spaces of each layer. This distance sensitivity with respect to the data aids in tasks such as uncertainty calibration and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. In previous works, features extracted with a distance sensitive model are used to construct feature covariance matrices which are used in deterministic uncertainty estimation or OOD detection. However, in cases where there is a distribution over tasks, these methods result in covariances which are sub-optimal, as they may not leverage all of the meta information which can be shared among tasks. With the use of an attentive set encoder, we propose to meta learn either diagonal or diagonal plus low-rank factors to efficiently construct task specific covariance matrices. Additionally, we propose an inference procedure which utilizes scaled energy to achieve a final predictive distribution which is well calibrated under a distributional dataset shift.
Conditional Object-Centric Learning from Video

Object-centric representations are a promising path toward more systematic generalization by providing flexible abstractions upon which compositional world models can be built. Recent work on simple 2D and 3D datasets has shown that models with object-centric inductive biases can learn to segment and represent meaningful objects from the statistical structure of the data alone without the need for any supervision. However, such fully-unsupervised methods still fail to scale to diverse realistic data, despite the use of increasingly complex inductive biases such as priors for the size of objects or the 3D geometry of the scene. In this paper, we instead take a weakly-supervised approach and focus on how 1) using the temporal dynamics of video data in the form of optical flow and 2) conditioning the model on simple object location cues can be used to enable segmenting and tracking objects in significantly more realistic synthetic data. We introduce a sequential extension to Slot Attention which we train to predict optical flow for realistic looking synthetic scenes and show that conditioning the initial state of this model on a small set of hints, such as center of mass of objects in the first frame, is sufficient to significantly improve instance segmentation. These benefits generalize beyond the training distribution to novel objects, novel backgrounds, and to longer video sequences. We also find that such initial-state-conditioning can be used during inference as a flexible interface to query the model for specific objects or parts of objects, which could pave the way for a range of weakly-supervised approaches and allow more effective interaction with trained models.
Scale Efficiently: Insights from Pretraining and Finetuning Transformers
Keywords: transformers, attention, deep learning

There remain many open questions pertaining to the scaling behaviour of Transformer architectures. These scaling decisions and findings can be critical, as training runs often come with an associated computational cost which have both financial and/or environmental impact. The goal of this paper is to present scaling insights from pretraining and finetuning Transformers. While Kaplan et al. presents a comprehensive study of the scaling behaviour of Transformer language models, the scope is only on the upstream (pretraining) loss. Therefore, it is still unclear if these set of findings transfer to downstream task within the context of the pretrain-finetune paradigm. The key findings of this paper are as follows: (1) we show that aside from only the model size, model shape matters for downstream fine-tuning, (2) scaling protocols operate differently at different compute regions, (3) widely adopted T5-base and T5-large sizes are Pareto-inefficient. To this end, we present improved scaling protocols whereby our redesigned models achieve similar downstream fine-tuning quality while having 50\% fewer parameters and training 40\% faster compared to the widely adopted T5-base model. We publicly release over 100 pretrained checkpoints of different T5 configurations to facilitate future research and analysis.
Vitruvion: A Generative Model of Parametric CAD Sketches
Keywords: generative modeling, CAD, transformers, design, geometric constraints

Parametric computer-aided design (CAD) tools are the predominant way that engineers specify physical structures, from bicycle pedals to airplanes to printed circuit boards. The key characteristic of parametric CAD is that design intent is encoded not only via geometric primitives, but also by parameterized constraints between the elements. This relational specification can be viewed as the construction of a constraint program, allowing edits to coherently propagate to other parts of the design. Machine learning offers the intriguing possibility of accelerating the design process via generative modeling of these structures, enabling new tools such as autocompletion, constraint inference, and conditional synthesis. In this work, we present such an approach to generative modeling of parametric CAD sketches, which constitute the basic computational building blocks of modern mechanical design. Our model, trained on real-world designs from the SketchGraphs dataset, autoregressively synthesizes sketches as sequences of primitives, with initial coordinates, and constraints that reference back to the sampled primitives. As samples from the model match the constraint graph representation used in standard CAD software, they may be directly imported, solved, and edited according to downstream design tasks. In addition, we condition the model on various contexts, including partial sketches (primers) and images of hand-drawn sketches. Evaluation of the proposed approach demonstrates its ability to synthesize realistic CAD sketches and its potential to aid the mechanical design workflow.
Space-Time Graph Neural Networks
Keywords: ST-GNNs, GNNs, stability, graph-time perturbations

We introduce space-time graph neural network (ST-GNN), a novel GNN architecture, tailored to jointly process the underlying space-time topology of time-varying network data. The cornerstone of our proposed architecture is the composition of time and graph convolutional filters followed by pointwise nonlinear activation functions. We introduce a generic definition of convolution operators that mimic the diffusion process of signals over its underlying support. On top of this definition, we propose space-time graph convolutions that are built upon a composition of time and graph shift operators.  We prove that ST-GNNs with multivariate integral Lipschitz filters are stable to small perturbations in the underlying graphs as well as small perturbations in the time domain caused by time warping. Our analysis shows that small variations in the network topology and time evolution of a system does not significantly affect the performance of ST-GNNs. Numerical experiments with decentralized control systems showcase the effectiveness and stability of the proposed ST-GNNs.
Scattering Networks on the Sphere for Scalable and Rotationally Equivariant Spherical CNNs

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) constructed natively on the sphere have been developed recently and shown to be highly effective for the analysis of spherical data.  While an efficient framework has been formulated, spherical CNNs are nevertheless highly computationally demanding; typically they cannot scale beyond spherical signals of thousands of pixels.  We develop scattering networks constructed natively on the sphere that provide a powerful representational space for spherical data.  Spherical scattering networks are computationally scalable and exhibit rotational equivariance, while their representational space is invariant to isometries and provides efficient and stable signal representations.  By integrating scattering networks as an additional type of layer in the generalized spherical CNN framework, we show how they can be leveraged to scale spherical CNNs to the high-resolution data typical of many practical applications, with spherical signals of many tens of megapixels and beyond.
Bayesian Neural Network Priors Revisited
Keywords: Bayesian deep learning, Bayesian neural networks, Priors

Isotropic Gaussian priors are the de facto standard for modern Bayesian neural network inference. However, it is unclear whether these priors accurately reflect our true beliefs about the weight distributions or give optimal performance. To find better priors, we study summary statistics of neural network weights in networks trained using stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We find that convolutional neural network (CNN) and ResNet weights display strong spatial correlations, while fully connected networks (FCNNs) display heavy-tailed weight distributions. We show that building these observations into priors can lead to improved performance on a variety of image classification datasets. Surprisingly, these priors mitigate the cold posterior effect in FCNNs, but slightly increase the cold posterior effect in ResNets.
Goal-Directed Planning via Hindsight Experience Replay
Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Goal-Directed Planning, Monte Carlo Tree Search

We consider the problem of goal-directed planning under a deterministic transition model. Monte Carlo Tree Search has shown remarkable performance in solving deterministic control problems. It has been extended from complex continuous domains through function approximators to bias the search of the planning tree in AlphaZero. Nonetheless, these algorithms still struggle with control problems with sparse rewards, such as goal-directed domains, where a positive reward is awarded only when reaching a goal state. In this work, we recast AlphaZero with Hindsight Experience Replay to tackle complex goal-directed planning tasks. We perform a thorough empirical evaluation in several simulated domains, including a novel application to a quantum compiling domain.
Hybrid Random Features
Keywords: random features, softmax kernel, attention mechanism, compositional kernels

We propose a new class of random feature methods for linearizing softmax and Gaussian kernels called hybrid random features (HRFs) that automatically adapt the quality of kernel estimation to provide most accurate approximation in the defined regions of interest. Special instantiations of HRFs lead to well-known methods such as trigonometric (Rahimi & Recht, 2007) or (recently introduced in the context of linear-attention Transformers) positive random features (Choromanski et al., 2021). By generalizing Bochner’s Theorem for softmax/Gaussian kernels and leveraging random features for compositional kernels, the HRF-mechanism provides strong theoretical guarantees - unbiased approximation and strictly smaller worst-case relative errors than its counterparts.  We conduct exhaustive empirical evaluation of HRF ranging from pointwise kernel estimation experiments, through tests on data admitting clustering structure to benchmarking implicit-attention Transformers (also for downstream Robotics applications), demonstrating its quality in a wide spectrum of machine learning problems.
Pretrained Language Model in Continual Learning: A Comparative Study
Keywords: Continual Learning, Pre-trained Language Model

Continual learning (CL) is a  setting in which a model learns from a stream of incoming data while avoiding to forget previously learned knowledge. Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been successfully employed in continual learning of different natural language problems. With the rapid development of many continual learning methods and PLMs, understanding and disentangling their interactions become essential for continued improvement of continual learning performance. In this paper, we thoroughly compare the continual learning performance over the combination of 5 PLMs and 4 CL approaches on 3 benchmarks in 2 typical incremental settings. Our extensive experimental analyses reveal interesting performance differences across PLMs and across CL methods. Furthermore, our representativeness probing analyses dissect PLMs’ performance characteristics in a layer-wise and task-wise manner, uncovering the extent to which their inner layers suffer from forgetting, and the effect of different CL approaches on each layer. Finally, our observations and analyses open up a number of important research questions that will inform and guide the design of effective continual learning techniques.
Salient ImageNet: How to discover spurious features in Deep Learning?
Keywords: interpretability, failure explanation, debugging, robustness

Deep neural networks can be unreliable in the real world especially when they heavily use {\it spurious} features for their predictions. Focusing on image classifications, we define {\it core features} as the set of visual features that are always a part of the object definition while {\it spurious features} are the ones that are likely to {\it co-occur} with the object but not a part of it (e.g., attribute ``fingers" for class ``band aid"). Traditional methods for discovering spurious features either require extensive human annotations (thus, not scalable), or are useful on specific models. In this work, we introduce a {\it general} framework to discover a subset of spurious and core visual features used in inferences of a general model and localize them on a large number of images with minimal human supervision. Our methodology is based on this key idea: to identify spurious or core \textit{visual features} used in model predictions, we identify spurious or core \textit{neural features} (penultimate layer neurons of a robust model) via limited human supervision (e.g., using top 5 activating images per feature). We then show that these neural feature annotations {\it generalize} extremely well to many more images {\it without} any human supervision. We use the activation maps for these neural features as the soft masks to highlight spurious or core visual features. Using this methodology, we introduce the {\it Salient Imagenet} dataset containing core and spurious masks for a large set of samples from Imagenet. Using this dataset, we show that several popular Imagenet models rely heavily on various spurious features in their predictions, indicating the standard accuracy alone is not sufficient to fully assess model' performance specially in safety-critical applications. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/singlasahil14/salient_imagenet}.
Differentiable DAG Sampling
Keywords: DAG, Differentiable, Sampling, Probabilistic model

We propose a new differentiable probabilistic model over DAGs (DP-DAG). DP-DAG allows fast and differentiable DAG sampling suited to continuous optimization. To this end, DP-DAG samples a DAG by successively (1) sampling a linear ordering of the node and (2) sampling edges consistent with the sampled linear ordering. We further propose VI-DP-DAG, a new method for DAG learning from observational data which combines DP-DAG with variational inference. Hence,VI-DP-DAG approximates the posterior probability over DAG edges given the observed data. VI-DP-DAG is guaranteed to output a valid DAG at any time during training and does not require any complex augmented Lagrangian optimization scheme in contrast to existing differentiable DAG learning approaches. In our extensive experiments, we compare VI-DP-DAG to other differentiable DAG learning baselines on synthetic and real datasets. VI-DP-DAG significantly improves DAG structure and causal mechanism learning while training faster than competitors.