arXiv research

Paper develops robust estimators and strategies for stochastic MABs with heavy-tailed rewards.

In this paper, we propose a novel perturbation-based exploration method in bandit algorithms with bounded or unbounded rewards, called residual bootstrap exploration (\texttt{ReBoot}). The \texttt{ReBoot} enforces exploration by injecting data-driven randomness through a residual-based perturbation mechanism. This nove…

Study reveals class-dependent effects in perturbation-based feature attribution metrics for time series classification.

Exploring a new method to explain AI models in medical devices.

Adversarial examples are malicious inputs crafted to cause a model to misclassify them. Their most common instantiation, "perturbation-based" adversarial examples introduce changes to the input that leave its true label unchanged, yet result in a different model prediction. Conversely, "invariance-based" adversarial ex…

Within the unmanageably large class of nonconvex optimization, we consider the rich subclass of nonsmooth problems that have composite objectives---this already includes the extensively studied convex, composite objective problems as a special case. For this subclass, we introduce a powerful, new framework that permits…

Feature attribution methods, or saliency maps, are one of the most popular approaches for explaining the decisions of complex machine learning models such as deep neural networks. In this study, we propose a stochastic optimization approach for the perturbation-based feature attribution method. While the original optim…

Volatility modelling has become a significant area of research within Financial Mathematics. Wiener process driven stochastic volatility models have become popular due their consistency with theoretical arguments and empirical observations. However such models lack the ability to take into account long term and fundame…

Paper develops a new kernel approximation framework.

Recent work has extensively shown that randomized perturbations of neural networks can improve robustness to adversarial attacks. The literature is, however, lacking a detailed compare-and-contrast of the latest proposals to understand what classes of perturbations work, when they work, and why they work. We contribute…

Differentiable architecture search (DARTS) is a prevailing NAS solution to identify architectures. Based on the continuous relaxation of the architecture space, DARTS learns a differentiable architecture weight and largely reduces the search cost. However, its stability has been challenged for yielding deteriorating ar…

Improved GSPGS estimators reduce bias in noisy function measurements.

Conformal-DP improves differential privacy on manifold data by calibrating perturbations based on local densities.

Recent research has revealed that the output of Deep Neural Networks (DNN) can be easily altered by adding relatively small perturbations to the input vector. In this paper, we analyze an attack in an extremely limited scenario where only one pixel can be modified. For that we propose a novel method for generating one-…

With the development of cloud computing and big data, the reliability of data storage systems becomes increasingly important. Previous researchers have shown that machine learning algorithms based on SMART attributes are effective methods to predict hard drive failures. In this paper, we use SMART attributes to predict…

We present a probabilistic framework for studying adversarial attacks on discrete data. Based on this framework, we derive a perturbation-based method, Greedy Attack, and a scalable learning-based method, Gumbel Attack, that illustrate various tradeoffs in the design of attacks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of thes…

Since deep neural networks are over-parameterized, they can memorize noisy examples. We address such a memorization issue in the presence of label noise. From the fact that deep neural networks cannot generalize to neighborhoods of memorized features, we hypothesize that noisy examples do not consistently incur small l…

We introduce a new stochastic smoothing perspective to study adversarial contextual bandit problems. We propose a general algorithm template that represents random perturbation based algorithms and identify several perturbation distributions that lead to strong regret bounds. Using the idea of smoothness, we provide an…

Perturbation-based explanation methods often measure the contribution of an input feature to an image classifier's outputs by heuristically removing it via e.g. blurring, adding noise, or graying out, which often produce unrealistic, out-of-samples. Instead, we propose to integrate a generative inpainter into three rep…

We investigate the optimality of perturbation based algorithms in the stochastic and adversarial multi-armed bandit problems. For the stochastic case, we provide a unified regret analysis for both sub-Weibull and bounded perturbations when rewards are sub-Gaussian. Our bounds are instance optimal for sub-Weibull pertur…

A new method trains discrete EBMs without sampling.

Small, carefully crafted perturbations called adversarial perturbations can easily fool neural networks. However, these perturbations are largely additive and not naturally found. We turn our attention to the field of Autonomous navigation wherein adverse weather conditions such as fog have a drastic effect on the pred…

Neural networks are vulnerable to adversarially-constructed perturbations of their inputs. Most research so far has considered perturbations of a fixed magnitude under some $l_p$ norm. Although studying these attacks is valuable, there has been increasing interest in the construction of (and robustness to) unrestricted…

Understanding the flow of information in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is a challenging problem that has gain increasing attention over the last few years. While several methods have been proposed to explain network predictions, there have been only a few attempts to compare them from a theoretical perspective. What is m…

Recent works on adversarial perturbations show that there is an inherent trade-off between standard test accuracy and adversarial accuracy. Specifically, they show that no classifier can simultaneously be robust to adversarial perturbations and achieve high standard test accuracy. However, this is contrary to the stand…

NGMs create mirrored features to assess neural network feature importance.

This work improves explanation quality for time series predictions by learning perturbations.

A new method improves language model extrapolation without changing training.

Privacy and transparency are two key foundations of trustworthy machine learning. Model explanations offer insights into a model's decisions on input data, whereas privacy is primarily concerned with protecting information about the training data. We analyze connections between model explanations and the leakage of sen…

New method for analyzing compositional data, addressing biases in summary statistics.

Adversarial examples are typically constructed by perturbing an existing data point within a small matrix norm, and current defense methods are focused on guarding against this type of attack. In this paper, we propose unrestricted adversarial examples, a new threat model where the attackers are not restricted to small…

REALITrees uses a Rashomon ensemble approach for active learning in sparse decision trees.

Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) and saliency maps have been recently used to explain the predictions of Deep Learning models, specifically in the domain of text classification. Given different attribution-based explanations to highlight relevant words for a predicted class label, experiments based on word deleti…

New approach reduces unconstrained linear bandits to simpler optimization problems.

Captum library simplifies model interpretability for PyTorch.

Gradient clipping helps private SGD converge despite potential bias.

The diversification (generating slightly varying separating discriminators) of Support Vector Machines (SVMs) for boosting has proven to be a challenge due to the strong learning nature of SVMs. Based on the insight that perturbing the SVM kernel may help in diversifying SVMs, we propose two kernel perturbation based b…

Optimizes differentially private kernel learning with random projection.

In this paper, we present an online reinforcement learning algorithm, called Renewal Monte Carlo (RMC), for infinite horizon Markov decision processes with a designated start state. RMC is a Monte Carlo algorithm and retains the advantages of Monte Carlo methods including low bias, simplicity, and ease of implementatio…

Despite their unprecedented performance in various domains, utilization of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in safety-critical environments is severely limited in the presence of even small adversarial perturbations. The present work develops a randomized approach to detecting such perturbations based on minimum uncertainty…

OLALA automates document layout annotation by selecting ambiguous regions for labeling.

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have become one of the most popular machine learning tools and are being applied in various tasks, however, CNN models are vulnerable to universal perturbations, which are usually human-imperceptible but can cause natural images to be misclassified with high probability. One of the s…

Adversarial examples are augmented data points generated by imperceptible perturbation of input samples. They have recently drawn much attention with the machine learning and data mining community. Being difficult to distinguish from real examples, such adversarial examples could change the prediction of many of the be…

We study the problem of globally recovering a dictionary from a set of signals via $\ell_1$-minimization. We assume that the signals are generated as i.i.d. random linear combinations of the $K$ atoms from a complete reference dictionary $D^*\in \mathbb R^{K\times K}$, where the linear combination coefficients are from…

A new framework optimizes model transfer across domains with labeled data.

New algorithm improves self-play reinforcement learning for competitive games.

Study on adversarial training's impact on deep neural reinforcement learning policies.

Study proposes a novel local explanation method for deep learning classifiers in process mining.