No Arabic abstract
Recent work has shown that, when integrated with adversarial training, self-supervised pre-training can lead to state-of-the-art robustness In this work, we improve robustness-aware self-supervised pre-training by learning representations that are consistent under both data augmentations and adversarial perturbations. Our approach leverages a recent contrastive learning framework, which learns representations by maximizing feature consistency under differently augmented views. This fits particularly well with the goal of adversarial robustness, as one cause of adversarial fragility is the lack of feature invariance, i.e., small input perturbations can result in undesirable large changes in features or even predicted labels. We explore various options to formulate the contrastive task, and demonstrate that by injecting adversarial perturbations, contrastive pre-training can lead to models that are both label-efficient and robust. We empirically evaluate the proposed Adversarial Contrastive Learning (ACL) and show it can consistently outperform existing methods. For example on the CIFAR-10 dataset, ACL outperforms the previous state-of-the-art unsupervised robust pre-training approach by 2.99% on robust accuracy and 2.14% on standard accuracy. We further demonstrate that ACL pre-training can improve semi-supervised adversarial training, even when only a few labeled examples are available. Our codes and pre-trained models have been released at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/Adversarial-Contrastive-Learning.
Recent developments in Natural Language Processing (NLP) demonstrate that large-scale, self-supervised pre-training can be extremely beneficial for downstream tasks. These ideas have been adapted to other domains, including the analysis of the amino acid sequences of proteins. However, to date most attempts on protein sequences rely on direct masked language model style pre-training. In this work, we design a new, adversarial pre-training method for proteins, extending and specializing similar advances in NLP. We show compelling results in comparison to traditional MLM pre-training, though further development is needed to ensure the gains are worth the significant computational cost.
Recently, many unsupervised deep learning methods have been proposed to learn clustering with unlabelled data. By introducing data augmentation, most of the latest methods look into deep clustering from the perspective that the original image and its transformation should share similar semantic clustering assignment. However, the representation features could be quite different even they are assigned to the same cluster since softmax function is only sensitive to the maximum value. This may result in high intra-class diversities in the representation feature space, which will lead to unstable local optimal and thus harm the clustering performance. To address this drawback, we proposed Deep Robust Clustering (DRC). Different from existing methods, DRC looks into deep clustering from two perspectives of both semantic clustering assignment and representation feature, which can increase inter-class diversities and decrease intra-class diversities simultaneously. Furthermore, we summarized a general framework that can turn any maximizing mutual information into minimizing contrastive loss by investigating the internal relationship between mutual information and contrastive learning. And we successfully applied it in DRC to learn invariant features and robust clusters. Extensive experiments on six widely-adopted deep clustering benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of DRC in both stability and accuracy. e.g., attaining 71.6% mean accuracy on CIFAR-10, which is 7.1% higher than state-of-the-art results.
Pre-trained self-supervised models such as BERT have achieved striking success in learning sequence representations, especially for natural language processing. These models typically corrupt the given sequences with certain types of noise, such as masking, shuffling, or substitution, and then try to recover the original input. However, such pre-training approaches are prone to learning representations that are covariant with the noise, leading to the discrepancy between the pre-training and fine-tuning stage. To remedy this, we present ContrAstive Pre-Training (CAPT) to learn noise invariant sequence representations. The proposed CAPT encourages the consistency between representations of the original sequence and its corrupted version via unsupervised instance-wise training signals. In this way, it not only alleviates the pretrain-finetune discrepancy induced by the noise of pre-training, but also aids the pre-trained model in better capturing global semantics of the input via more effective sentence-level supervision. Different from most prior work that focuses on a particular modality, comprehensive empirical evidence on 11 natural language understanding and cross-modal tasks illustrates that CAPT is applicable for both language and vision-language tasks, and obtains surprisingly consistent improvement, including 0.6% absolute gain on GLUE benchmarks and 0.8% absolute increment on $text{NLVR}^2$.
In this paper, we study fast training of adversarially robust models. From the analyses of the state-of-the-art defense method, i.e., the multi-step adversarial training, we hypothesize that the gradient magnitude links to the model robustness. Motivated by this, we propose to perturb both the image and the label during training, which we call Bilateral Adversarial Training (BAT). To generate the adversarial label, we derive an closed-form heuristic solution. To generate the adversarial image, we use one-step targeted attack with the target label being the most confusing class. In the experiment, we first show that random start and the most confusing target attack effectively prevent the label leaking and gradient masking problem. Then coupled with the adversarial label part, our model significantly improves the state-of-the-art results. For example, against PGD100 white-box attack with cross-entropy loss, on CIFAR10, we achieve 63.7% versus 47.2%; on SVHN, we achieve 59.1% versus 42.1%. At last, the experiment on the very (computationally) challenging ImageNet dataset further demonstrates the effectiveness of our fast method.
The pre-trained neural models have recently achieved impressive performances in understanding multimodal content. However, it is still very challenging to pre-train neural models for video and language understanding, especially for Chinese video-language data, due to the following reasons. Firstly, existing video-language pre-training algorithms mainly focus on the co-occurrence of words and video frames, but ignore other valuable semantic and structure information of video-language content, e.g., sequential order and spatiotemporal relationships. Secondly, there exist conflicts between video sentence alignment and other proxy tasks. Thirdly, there is a lack of large-scale and high-quality Chinese video-language datasets (e.g., including 10 million unique videos), which are the fundamental success conditions for pre-training techniques. In this work, we propose a novel video-language understanding framework named VICTOR, which stands for VIdeo-language understanding via Contrastive mulTimOdal pRe-training. Besides general proxy tasks such as masked language modeling, VICTOR constructs several novel proxy tasks under the contrastive learning paradigm, making the model be more robust and able to capture more complex multimodal semantic and structural relationships from different perspectives. VICTOR is trained on a large-scale Chinese video-language dataset, including over 10 million complete videos with corresponding high-quality textual descriptions. We apply the pre-trained VICTOR model to a series of downstream applications and demonstrate its superior performances, comparing against the state-of-the-art pre-training methods such as VideoBERT and UniVL. The codes and trained checkpoints will be publicly available to nourish further developments of the research community.