No Arabic abstract
We introduce a new measure to evaluate the transferability of representations learned by classifiers. Our measure, the Log Expected Empirical Prediction (LEEP), is simple and easy to compute: when given a classifier trained on a source data set, it only requires running the target data set through this classifier once. We analyze the properties of LEEP theoretically and demonstrate its effectiveness empirically. Our analysis shows that LEEP can predict the performance and convergence speed of both transfer and meta-transfer learning methods, even for small or imbalanced data. Moreover, LEEP outperforms recently proposed transferability measures such as negative conditional entropy and H scores. Notably, when transferring from ImageNet to CIFAR100, LEEP can achieve up to 30% improvement compared to the best competing method in terms of the correlations with actual transfer accuracy.
Despite the significant advances in deep learning over the past decade, a major challenge that limits the wide-spread adoption of deep learning has been their fragility to adversarial attacks. This sensitivity to making erroneous predictions in the presence of adversarially perturbed data makes deep neural networks difficult to adopt for certain real-world, mission-critical applications. While much of the research focus has revolved around adversarial example creation and adversarial hardening, the area of performance measures for assessing adversarial robustness is not well explored. Motivated by this, this study presents the concept of residual error, a new performance measure for not only assessing the adversarial robustness of a deep neural network at the individual sample level, but also can be used to differentiate between adversarial and non-adversarial examples to facilitate for adversarial example detection. Furthermore, we introduce a hybrid model for approximating the residual error in a tractable manner. Experimental results using the case of image classification demonstrates the effectiveness and efficacy of the proposed residual error metric for assessing several well-known deep neural network architectures. These results thus illustrate that the proposed measure could be a useful tool for not only assessing the robustness of deep neural networks used in mission-critical scenarios, but also in the design of adversarially robust models.
Lossy image compression is often limited by the simplicity of the chosen loss measure. Recent research suggests that generative adversarial networks have the ability to overcome this limitation and serve as a multi-modal loss, especially for textures. Together with learned image compression, these two techniques can be used to great effect when relaxing the commonly employed tight measures of distortion. However, convolutional neural network based algorithms have a large computational footprint. Ideally, an existing conventional codec should stay in place, which would ensure faster adoption and adhering to a balanced computational envelope. As a possible avenue to this goal, in this work, we propose and investigate how learned image coding can be used as a surrogate to optimize an image for encoding. The image is altered by a learned filter to optimise for a different performance measure or a particular task. Extending this idea with a generative adversarial network, we show how entire textures are replaced by ones that are less costly to encode but preserve sense of detail. Our approach can remodel a conventional codec to adjust for the MS-SSIM distortion with over 20% rate improvement without any decoding overhead. On task-aware image compression, we perform favourably against a similar but codec-specific approach.
We propose a novel approach for estimating the difficulty and transferability of supervised classification tasks. Unlike previous work, our approach is solution agnostic and does not require or assume trained models. Instead, we estimate these values using an information theoretic approach: treating training labels as random variables and exploring their statistics. When transferring from a source to a target task, we consider the conditional entropy between two such variables (i.e., label assignments of the two tasks). We show analytically and empirically that this value is related to the loss of the transferred model. We further show how to use this value to estimate task hardness. We test our claims extensively on three large scale data sets -- CelebA (40 tasks), Animals with Attributes 2 (85 tasks), and Caltech-UCSD Birds 200 (312 tasks) -- together representing 437 classification tasks. We provide results showing that our hardness and transferability estimates are strongly correlated with empirical hardness and transferability. As a case study, we transfer a learned face recognition model to CelebA attribute classification tasks, showing state of the art accuracy for tasks estimated to be highly transferable.
Neural networks that are based on unfolding of an iterative solver, such as LISTA (learned iterative soft threshold algorithm), are widely used due to their accelerated performance. Nevertheless, as opposed to non-learned solvers, these networks are trained on a certain dictionary, and therefore they are inapplicable for varying model scenarios. This work introduces an adaptive learned solver, termed Ada-LISTA, which receives pairs of signals and their corresponding dictionaries as inputs, and learns a universal architecture to serve them all. We prove that this scheme is guaranteed to solve sparse coding in linear rate for varying models, including dictionary perturbations and permutations. We also provide an extensive numerical study demonstrating its practical adaptation capabilities. Finally, we deploy Ada-LISTA to natural image inpainting, where the patch-masks vary spatially, thus requiring such an adaptation.
Regional adversarial attacks often rely on complicated methods for generating adversarial perturbations, making it hard to compare their efficacy against well-known attacks. In this study, we show that effective regional perturbations can be generated without resorting to complex methods. We develop a very simple regional adversarial perturbation attack method using cross-entropy sign, one of the most commonly used losses in adversarial machine learning. Our experiments on ImageNet with multiple models reveal that, on average, $76%$ of the generated adversarial examples maintain model-to-model transferability when the perturbation is applied to local image regions. Depending on the selected region, these localized adversarial examples require significantly less $L_p$ norm distortion (for $p in {0, 2, infty}$) compared to their non-local counterparts. These localized attacks therefore have the potential to undermine defenses that claim robustness under the aforementioned norms.