equivalent space
Differentiable Neural Architecture Search in Equivalent Space with Exploration Enhancement
Recent works on One-Shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) mostly adopt a bilevel optimization scheme to alternatively optimize the supernet weights and architecture parameters after relaxing the discrete search space into a differentiable space. However, the non-negligible incongruence in their relaxation methods is hard to guarantee the differentiable optimization in the continuous space is equivalent to the optimization in the discrete space. Differently, this paper utilizes a variational graph autoencoder to injectively transform the discrete architecture space into an equivalently continuous latent space, to resolve the incongruence. A probabilistic exploration enhancement method is accordingly devised to encourage intelligent exploration during the architecture search in the latent space, to avoid local optimal in architecture search. As the catastrophic forgetting in differentiable One-Shot NAS deteriorates supernet predictive ability and makes the bilevel optimization inefficient, this paper further proposes an architecture complementation method to relieve this deficiency. We analyze the effectiveness of the proposed method, and a series of experiments have been conducted to compare the proposed method with state-of-the-art One-Shot NAS methods.
Disappearing Ink: Obfuscation Breaks N-gram Code Watermarks in Theory and Practice
Zhang, Gehao, Bagdasarian, Eugene, Zhai, Juan, Ma, Shiqing
Distinguishing AI-generated code from human-written code is becoming crucial for tasks such as authorship attribution, content tracking, and misuse detection. Based on this, N-gram-based watermarking schemes have emerged as prominent, which inject secret watermarks to be detected during the generation. However, their robustness in code content remains insufficiently evaluated. Most claims rely solely on defenses against simple code transformations or code optimizations as a simulation of attack, creating a questionable sense of robustness. In contrast, more sophisticated schemes already exist in the software engineering world, e.g., code obfuscation, which significantly alters code while preserving functionality. Although obfuscation is commonly used to protect intellectual property or evade software scanners, the robustness of code watermarking techniques against such transformations remains largely unexplored. In this work, we formally model the code obfuscation and prove the impossibility of N-gram-based watermarking's robustness with only one intuitive and experimentally verified assumption, distribution consistency, satisfied. Given the original false positive rate of the watermarking detection, the ratio that the detector failed on the watermarked code after obfuscation will increase to 1 - fpr. The experiments have been performed on three SOTA watermarking schemes, two LLMs, two programming languages, four code benchmarks, and four obfuscators. Among them, all watermarking detectors show coin-flipping detection abilities on obfuscated codes (AUROC tightly surrounds 0.5). Among all models, watermarking schemes, and datasets, both programming languages own obfuscators that can achieve attack effects with no detection AUROC higher than 0.6 after the attack. Based on the theoretical and practical observations, we also proposed a potential path of robust code watermarking.
Review for NeurIPS paper: Differentiable Neural Architecture Search in Equivalent Space with Exploration Enhancement
Weaknesses: The paper is not very novel or significant in its contribution. It compiles two regularization methods to mitigate two long-standing problems in differentiable NAS, however, the proposed methods are not very novel. NAS-Bench is not a very well established benchmark that not many people are very familiar with. It is not fair to compare with existing work on NAS-bench, as most of them were not optimized on NAS-Bench. For instance, the DARTS work may work equally well with proper hyperparameter tuning and regularization. With the existing DARTS hyperparmeters, search on NAS-bench converges to networks with only identity/skip operation.
Review for NeurIPS paper: Differentiable Neural Architecture Search in Equivalent Space with Exploration Enhancement
The reviewers generally found this paper to be a good contribution to the NAO/NAS field, with a good motivation and strong results. There were concerns on the novelty of the work, but after considering the author's response, particularly in relation to EWC, I think the work is sufficiently novel, especially given the relatively new domain. I would encourage the authors to include the clarifications and comparison to related work from the rebuttal in the main paper. The biggest issue that still lingers is the fact that NAS-Bench-201 is a very small benchmark. The most positive reviewer strongly encourages the authors to apply their technique to a larger benchmark such as NAS-Bench-1Shot1.
Differentiable Neural Architecture Search in Equivalent Space with Exploration Enhancement
Recent works on One-Shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) mostly adopt a bilevel optimization scheme to alternatively optimize the supernet weights and architecture parameters after relaxing the discrete search space into a differentiable space. However, the non-negligible incongruence in their relaxation methods is hard to guarantee the differentiable optimization in the continuous space is equivalent to the optimization in the discrete space. Differently, this paper utilizes a variational graph autoencoder to injectively transform the discrete architecture space into an equivalently continuous latent space, to resolve the incongruence. A probabilistic exploration enhancement method is accordingly devised to encourage intelligent exploration during the architecture search in the latent space, to avoid local optimal in architecture search. As the catastrophic forgetting in differentiable One-Shot NAS deteriorates supernet predictive ability and makes the bilevel optimization inefficient, this paper further proposes an architecture complementation method to relieve this deficiency. We analyze the effectiveness of the proposed method, and a series of experiments have been conducted to compare the proposed method with state-of-the-art One-Shot NAS methods.