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 Tang, Shuai


Encoding Argumentation Frameworks to Propositional Logic Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The theory of argumentation frameworks ($AF$s) has been a useful tool for artificial intelligence. The research of the connection between $AF$s and logic is an important branch. This paper generalizes the encoding method by encoding $AF$s as logical formulas in different propositional logic systems. It studies the relationship between models of an AF by argumentation semantics, including Dung's classical semantics and Gabbay's equational semantics, and models of the encoded formulas by semantics of propositional logic systems. Firstly, we supplement the proof of the regular encoding function in the case of encoding $AF$s to the 2-valued propositional logic system. Then we encode $AF$s to 3-valued propositional logic systems and fuzzy propositional logic systems and explore the model relationship. This paper enhances the connection between $AF$s and propositional logic systems. It also provides a new way to construct new equational semantics by choosing different fuzzy logic operations.


Reconstruction Attacks on Machine Unlearning: Simple Models are Vulnerable

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As model training on personal data becomes commonplace, there has been a growing literature on data protection in machine learning (ML), which includes at least two thrusts: Data Privacy The primary concern regarding data privacy in machine learning (ML) applications is that models might inadvertently reveal details about the individual data points used in their training. This type of privacy risk can manifest in various ways, ranging from membership inference attacks [27]--which only seek to confirm whether a specific individual's data was used in the training--to more severe reconstruction attacks [10] that attempt to recover entire data records of numerous individuals. To address these risks, algorithms that adhere to differential privacy standards [12] provide proven safeguards, specifically limiting the ability to infer information about individual training data. Machine Unlearning Proponents of data autonomy have advocated for individuals to have the right to decide how their data is used, including the right to retroactively ask that their data and its influences be removed from any model trained on it. Data deletion, or machine unlearning, refer to technical approaches which allow such removal of influence [15, 4]. The idea is that, after an individual's data is deleted, the resulting model should be in the state it would have been had the model originally been trained without the individual in question's data. The primary focus of this literature has been on achieving or approximating this condition for complex models in ways that are more computationally efficient than full retraining (see e.g.


Membership Inference Attacks on Diffusion Models via Quantile Regression

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recently, diffusion models have become popular tools for image synthesis because of their high-quality outputs. However, like other large-scale models, they may leak private information about their training data. Here, we demonstrate a privacy vulnerability of diffusion models through a \emph{membership inference (MI) attack}, which aims to identify whether a target example belongs to the training set when given the trained diffusion model. Our proposed MI attack learns quantile regression models that predict (a quantile of) the distribution of reconstruction loss on examples not used in training. This allows us to define a granular hypothesis test for determining the membership of a point in the training set, based on thresholding the reconstruction loss of that point using a custom threshold tailored to the example. We also provide a simple bootstrap technique that takes a majority membership prediction over ``a bag of weak attackers'' which improves the accuracy over individual quantile regression models. We show that our attack outperforms the prior state-of-the-art attack while being substantially less computationally expensive -- prior attacks required training multiple ``shadow models'' with the same architecture as the model under attack, whereas our attack requires training only much smaller models.


Scalable Membership Inference Attacks via Quantile Regression

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The basic goal of privacy-preserving machine learning is to find models that are predictive on some underlying data distribution, without being disclosive of the particular data points on which they were trained. The simplest kind of attack that can be launched on a trained model--falsifying privacy guarantees--is a membership inference attack. A membership inference attack, informally, is a statistical test that is able to reliably determine whether a particular data point was included in the training set used to train the model or not. Almost all membership inference attacks are based on the observation that models tend to overfit their training sets in different ways. In particular, they tend to systematically predict higher confidence in the true labels of data points from their training set, compared to points drawn from the same distribution not in their training set. The confidence that a model places on the true label of a data-point is thus a natural test statistic to build a membership-inference hypothesis test around. A variety of recent methods [Shokri et al., 2017, Long et al., 2020, Sablayrolles et al., 2019, Song and Mittal, 2021, Carlini et al., 2022] are based around this idea, and aim to estimate the distribution of the test statistic (the confidence assigned to the true label of a datapoint) over the distribution of datapoints that were not used in training (and sometimes, Martin and Shuai are lead authors; all other authors are listed in alphabetical order.


Improved Differentially Private Regression via Gradient Boosting

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We revisit the problem of differentially private squared error linear regression. We observe that existing state-of-the-art methods are sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters -- including the ``clipping threshold'' that cannot be set optimally in a data-independent way. We give a new algorithm for private linear regression based on gradient boosting. We show that our method consistently improves over the previous state of the art when the clipping threshold is taken to be fixed without knowledge of the data, rather than optimized in a non-private way -- and that even when we optimize the hyperparameters of competitor algorithms non-privately, our algorithm is no worse and often better. In addition to a comprehensive set of experiments, we give theoretical insights to explain this behavior.


Private Synthetic Data for Multitask Learning and Marginal Queries

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We provide a differentially private algorithm for producing synthetic data simultaneously useful for multiple tasks: marginal queries and multitask machine learning (ML). A key innovation in our algorithm is the ability to directly handle numerical features, in contrast to a number of related prior approaches which require numerical features to be first converted into {high cardinality} categorical features via {a binning strategy}. Higher binning granularity is required for better accuracy, but this negatively impacts scalability. Eliminating the need for binning allows us to produce synthetic data preserving large numbers of statistical queries such as marginals on numerical features, and class conditional linear threshold queries. Preserving the latter means that the fraction of points of each class label above a particular half-space is roughly the same in both the real and synthetic data. This is the property that is needed to train a linear classifier in a multitask setting. Our algorithm also allows us to produce high quality synthetic data for mixed marginal queries, that combine both categorical and numerical features. Our method consistently runs 2-5x faster than the best comparable techniques, and provides significant accuracy improvements in both marginal queries and linear prediction tasks for mixed-type datasets.


Fast Adaptation with Linearized Neural Networks

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The inductive biases of trained neural networks are difficult to understand and, consequently, to adapt to new settings. We study the inductive biases of linearizations of neural networks, which we show to be surprisingly good summaries of the full network functions. Inspired by this finding, we propose a technique for embedding these inductive biases into Gaussian processes through a kernel designed from the Jacobian of the network. In this setting, domain adaptation takes the form of interpretable posterior inference, with accompanying uncertainty estimation. This inference is analytic and free of local optima issues found in standard techniques such as fine-tuning neural network weights to a new task. We develop significant computational speed-ups based on matrix multiplies, including a novel implementation for scalable Fisher vector products. Our experiments on both image classification and regression demonstrate the promise and convenience of this framework for transfer learning, compared to neural network fine-tuning. Code is available at https://github.com/amzn/xfer/tree/master/finite_ntk.


Deep Transfer Learning with Ridge Regression

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The large amount of online data and vast array of computing resources enable current researchers in both industry and academia to employ the power of deep learning with neural networks. While deep models trained with massive amounts of data demonstrate promising generalisation ability on unseen data from relevant domains, the computational cost of finetuning gradually becomes a bottleneck in transfering the learning to new domains. We address this issue by leveraging the low-rank property of learnt feature vectors produced from deep neural networks (DNNs) with the closed-form solution provided in kernel ridge regression (KRR). This frees transfer learning from finetuning and replaces it with an ensemble of linear systems with many fewer hyperparameters. Our method is successful on supervised and semi-supervised transfer learning tasks.


An Empirical Study on Post-processing Methods for Word Embeddings

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Word embeddings learnt from large corpora have been adopted in various applications in natural language processing and served as the general input representations to learning systems. Recently, a series of post-processing methods have been proposed to boost the performance of word embeddings on similarity comparison and analogy retrieval tasks, and some have been adapted to compose sentence representations. The general hypothesis behind these methods is that by enforcing the embedding space to be more isotropic, the similarity between words can be better expressed. We view these methods as an approach to shrink the covariance/gram matrix, which is estimated by learning word vectors, towards a scaled identity matrix. By optimising an objective in the semi-Riemannian manifold with Centralised Kernel Alignment (CKA), we are able to search for the optimal shrinkage parameter, and provide a post-processing method to smooth the spectrum of learnt word vectors which yields improved performance on downstream tasks.


Multi-view Sentence Representation Learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Multi-view learning can provide self-supervision when different views are available of the same data. The distributional hypothesis provides another form of useful self-supervision from adjacent sentences which are plentiful in large unlabelled corpora. Motivated by the asymmetry in the two hemispheres of the human brain as well as the observation that different learning architectures tend to emphasise different aspects of sentence meaning, we create a unified multi-view sentence representation learning framework, in which, one view encodes the input sentence with a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and the other view encodes it with a simple linear model, and the training objective is to maximise the agreement specified by the adjacent context information between two views. We show that, after training, the vectors produced from our multi-view training provide improved representations over the single-view training, and the combination of different views gives further representational improvement and demonstrates solid transferability on standard downstream tasks.