TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given the abstract of a research paper. Your task is to generate a summary of this abstract. Your summary should not be very short, but it's better if it's not more than 30 words.
PROBLEM: Deep learning models are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples. A practical adversarial attack should require as little as possible knowledge of attacked models T. Current substitute attacks need pre-trained models to generate adversarial examples and their attack success rates heavily rely on the transferability of adversarial examples. Current score-based and decision-based attacks require lots of queries for the T. In this study, we propose a novel adversarial imitation attack. First, it produces a replica of the T by a two-player game like the generative adversarial networks (GANs). The objective of the generative model G is to generate examples which lead D returning different outputs with T. The objective of the discriminative model D is to output the same labels with T under the same inputs. Then, the adversarial examples generated by D are utilized to fool the T. Compared with the current substitute attacks, imitation attack can use less training data to produce a replica of T and improve the transferability of adversarial examples. Experiments demonstrate that our imitation attack requires less training data than the black-box substitute attacks, but achieves an attack success rate close to the white-box attack on unseen data with no query.

SOLUTION: A novel adversarial imitation attack to fool machine learning models.

PROBLEM: Neural program embeddings have shown much promise recently for a variety of program analysis tasks, including program synthesis, program repair, code completion, and fault localization. However, most existing program embeddings are based on syntactic features of programs, such as token sequences or abstract syntax trees. Unlike images and text, a program has well-defined semantics that can be difficult to capture by only considering its syntax (i.e. syntactically similar programs can exhibit vastly different run-time behavior), which makes syntax-based program embeddings fundamentally limited. We propose a novel semantic program embedding that is learned from program execution traces. Our key insight is that program states expressed as sequential tuples of live variable values not only capture program semantics more precisely, but also offer a more natural fit for Recurrent Neural Networks to model. We evaluate different syntactic and semantic program embeddings on the task of classifying the types of errors that students make in their submissions to an introductory programming class and on the CodeHunt education platform. Our evaluation results show that the semantic program embeddings significantly outperform the syntactic program embeddings based on token sequences and abstract syntax trees. In addition, we augment a search-based program repair system with predictions made from our semantic embedding and demonstrate significantly improved search efficiency.

SOLUTION: A new way of learning semantic program embedding

PROBLEM: We propose a new learning-based approach to solve ill-posed inverse problems in imaging. We address the case where ground truth training samples are rare and the problem is severely ill-posed---both because of the underlying physics and because we can only get few measurements. This setting is common in geophysical imaging and remote sensing. We show that in this case the common approach to directly learn the mapping from the measured data to the reconstruction becomes unstable. Instead, we propose to first learn an ensemble of simpler mappings from the data to projections of the unknown image into random piecewise-constant subspaces. We then combine the projections to form a final reconstruction by solving a deconvolution-like problem. We show experimentally that the proposed method is more robust to measurement noise and corruptions not seen during training than a directly learned inverse.

SOLUTION:
We solve ill-posed inverse problems with scarce ground truth examples by estimating an ensemble of random projections of the model instead of the model itself.