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Despite remarkable achievements in artificial intelligence, the deployability of learning-enabled systems in high-stakes real-world environments still faces persistent challenges. For example, in safety-critical domains like autonomous driving, robotic manipulation, and healthcare, it is crucial not only to achieve high performance but also to comply with given constraints. Furthermore, adaptability becomes paramount in non-stationary domains, where environmental parameters are subject to change. While safety and adaptability are recognized as key qualities for the new generation of AI, current approaches have not demonstrated effective adaptable performance in constrained settings. Hence, this paper breaks new ground by studying the unique challenges of ensuring safety in \textit{non-stationary} environments by solving constrained problems through the lens of the meta-learning approach (learning-to-learn). While unconstrained meta-learning already encounters complexities in end-to-end differentiation of the loss due to the bi-level nature, its constrained counterpart introduces an additional layer of difficulty, since the constraints imposed on task-level updates complicate the differentiation process. To address the issue, we first employ successive convex-constrained policy updates across multiple tasks with differentiable convex programming, which allows meta-learning in constrained scenarios by enabling end-to-end differentiation. This approach empowers the agent to rapidly adapt to new tasks under non-stationarity while ensuring compliance with safety constraints. We also provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating guaranteed monotonic improvement of our approach, justifying our algorithmic designs. Extensive simulations across diverse environments provide empirical validation with significant improvement over established benchmarks.

AAAI 2024

Constrained Meta-Reinforcement Learning for Adaptable Safety Guarantee with Differentiable Convex Programming

differential convex programming

constrained reinforcement learning

meta-reinforcement learning

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

Safety is an indispensable requirement for applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real problems. Although there has been a surge of safe RL algorithms proposed in recent years, most existing work typically 1) relies on receiving numeric safety feedback; 2) does not guarantee safety during the learning process; 3) limits the problem to a priori known, deterministic transition dynamics; and/or 4) assume the existence of a known safe policy for any states. Addressing the issues mentioned above, we thus propose Long-term Binary-feedback Safe RL (LoBiSaRL), a safe RL algorithm for constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with binary safety feedback and an unknown, stochastic state transition function. LoBiSaRL optimizes a policy to maximize rewards while guaranteeing long-term safety that an agent executes only safe state-action pairs throughout each episode with high probability. Specifically, LoBiSaRL models the binary safety function via a generalized linear model (GLM) and conservatively takes only a safe action at every time step while inferring its effect on future safety under proper assumptions. Our theoretical results show that LoBiSaRL guarantees the long-term safety constraint, with high probability. Finally, our empirical results demonstrate that our algorithm is safer than existing methods without significantly compromising performance in terms of reward.

Long-Term Safe Reinforcement Learning with Binary Feedback

Formal certification of Neural Networks (NNs) is crucial for ensuring their safety, fairness, and robustness. Unfortunately, on the one hand, sound and complete certification algorithms of ReLU-based NNs do not scale to large-scale NNs. On the other hand, incomplete certification algorithms are easier to compute, but they result in loose bounds that deteriorate with the depth of NN, which diminishes their effectiveness. In this paper, we ask the following question; can we replace the ReLU activation function with one that opens the door to incomplete certification algorithms that are easy to compute but can produce tight bounds on the NN's outputs? We introduce DeepBern-Nets, a class of NNs with activation functions based on Bernstein polynomials instead of the commonly used ReLU activation. Bernstein polynomials are smooth and differentiable functions with desirable properties such as the so-called range enclosure and subdivision properties. We design a novel Interval Bound Propagation (IBP) algorithm, called Bern-IBP, to efficiently compute tight bounds on DeepBern-Nets outputs. Our approach leverages the properties of Bernstein polynomials to improve the tractability of neural network certification tasks while maintaining the accuracy of the trained networks. We conduct experiments in adversarial robustness and reachability analysis settings to assess the effectiveness of the approach. Our proposed framework achieves high certified accuracy for adversarially-trained NNs, which is often a challenging task for certifiers of ReLU-based NNs. This work establishes Bernstein polynomial activation as a promising alternative for improving NN certification tasks across various NNs applications.

DeepBern-Nets: Taming the Complexity of Certifying Neural Networks Using Bernstein Polynomial Activations and Precise Bound Propagation

Federated learning systems are susceptible to adversarial attacks. To combat this, we introduce a novel aggregator based on Huber loss minimization, and provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis. Under independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) assumption, our approach has several advantages compared to existing methods. Firstly, it has optimal dependence on epsilon, which stands for the ratio of attacked clients. Secondly, our approach does not need precise knowledge of epsilon. Thirdly, it allows different clients to have unequal data sizes. We then broaden our analysis to include non-i.i.d data, such that clients have slightly different distributions.

A Huber Loss Minimization Approach to Byzantine Robust Federated Learning

Recent advances in backdoor attacks, like leveraging complex triggers or stealthy implanting techniques, have   introduced new challenges in backdoor scanning, limiting the usability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose Unlearning-based Model Ablation (UMA), a novel approach to facilitate backdoor scanning and defend against advanced backdoor attacks. UMA filters out backdoor-irrelevant features by ablating the inherent features of the target class within the model and subsequently reveals the backdoor through dynamic trigger optimization. We evaluate our method on 1700 models (700 benign and 1000 trojaned) with 6 model structures, 7 different backdoor attacks and 4 datasets. Our results demonstrate that the proposed methodology effectively detect these advanced backdoors. Specifically, our method can achieve 91% AUC-ROC and 86.6% detection accuracy on average, which outperforms the baselines, including Neural Cleanse, ABS, K-Arm and MNTD.

UMA: Facilitating Backdoor Scanning via Unlearning-Based Model Ablation

In the rapidly growing digital economy, protecting intellectual property (IP) associated with digital products has become increasingly important.  Within this context, machine learning (ML) models, being highly valuable digital assets, have gained significant attention for IP protection. This paper introduces a practical encryption-based framework called EncryIP, which seamlessly integrates a public-key encryption scheme into the model learning process. This approach enables the protected model to generate randomized and confused labels, ensuring that only individuals with accurate secret keys, signifying authorized users, can decrypt and reveal authentic labels. Importantly, the proposed framework not only facilitates the protected model to multiple authorized users without requiring repetitive training of the original ML model with IP protection methods but also maintains the model's performance without compromising its accuracy. Compared to existing methods like watermark-based, trigger-based, and passport-based approaches, EncryIP demonstrates superior effectiveness in both training protected models and efficiently detecting the unauthorized spread of ML models.

EncryIP: A Practical Encryption-Based Framework for Model Intellectual Property Protection

Large language models are becoming increasingly practical for translating code across programming languages, a process known as transpiling. Even though automated transpilation significantly boosts developer productivity, a key concern is whether the generated code is correct. Existing work initially used manually crafted test suites to test the translations of a small corpus of programs; these test suites were later automated. In contrast, we devise the first approach for automated, functional, property-based testing of code translation models. Our general, user-provided specifications about the transpiled code capture a range of properties, from purely syntactic to purely semantic ones. As shown by our experiments, this approach is very effective in detecting property violations in popular code translation models, and therefore, in evaluating model quality with respect to given properties. We also go a step further and explore the usage scenario where a user simply aims to obtain a correct translation of some code with respect to certain properties without necessarily being concerned about the overall quality of the model. To this purpose, we develop the first property-guided search procedure for code translation models, where a model is repeatedly queried with slightly different parameters to produce alternative and potentially more correct translations. Our results show that this search procedure helps to obtain significantly better code translations.

Automatically Testing Functional Properties of Code Translation Models | VIDEO

Deep Neural Networks are prone to learning spurious correlations embedded in the training data, leading to potentially biased predictions. This poses risks when deploying these models for high-stake decision-making, such as in medical applications. Current methods for post-hoc model correction either require input-level annotations which are only possible for spatially localized biases, or augment the latent feature space, thereby hoping to enforce the right reasons. We present a novel method for model correction on the concept level that explicitly reduces model sensitivity towards biases via gradient penalization. When modeling biases via Concept Activation Vectors, we highlight the importance of choosing robust directions, as traditional regression-based approaches such as Support Vector Machines tend to result in diverging directions. We effectively mitigate biases in controlled and real-world settings on the ISIC, Bone Age, ImageNet and CelebA datasets using VGG, ResNet and EfficientNet architectures. Code and Appendix are available on https://github.com/frederikpahde/rrclarc.

From Hope to Safety: Unlearning Biases of Deep Models via Gradient Penalization in Latent Space | VIDEO

Counterfactual explanations shed light on the decisions of black-box models by explaining
how an input can be altered to obtain a favourable decision from the model (e.g., when a loan application has been rejected).
However, as noted recently, counterfactual explainers may lack robustness in the sense that a minor change
in the input can cause a major change in the explanation. This can cause confusion on the user side and
open the door for adversarial attacks. In this paper, we study some sources of non-robustness. 
While there are fundamental reasons for why an explainer that returns a single counterfactual cannot be
robust in all instances, we show that some interesting robustness guarantees can be given by reporting 
multiple rather than a single counterfactual. Unfortunately, the number of counterfactuals that need to
be reported for the theoretical guarantees to hold can be prohibitively large. We therefore propose an approximation
algorithm that uses a diversity criterion to select a feasible number of most relevant explanations and study its robustness empirically. Our experiments indicate that our method improves the
state-of-the-art in generating robust explanations, while maintaining other desirable properties
and providing competitive computational performance.

Promoting Counterfactual Robustness through Diversity

Discriminative learning effectively predicts true object class for image classification. However, it often results in false positives for outliers, posing critical concerns in applications like autonomous driving and video surveillance systems. Previous attempts to address this challenge involved training image classifiers through contrastive learning using actual outlier data or synthesizing outliers for self-supervised learning. Furthermore, unsupervised generative modeling of inliers in pixel space has shown limited success for outlier detection. In this work, we introduce a quantile-based maximum likelihood objective for learning the inlier distribution to improve the outlier separation during inference. Our approach fits a normalizing flow to pre-trained discriminative features and detects the outliers according to the evaluated log-likelihood. The experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our method as it surpasses the performance of the state-of-the-art unsupervised methods for outlier detection. The results are also competitive compared with a recent self-supervised approach for outlier detection. Our work allows to reduce dependency on well-sampled negative training data, which is especially important for domains like medical diagnostics or remote sensing.

Quantile-Based Maximum Likelihood Training for Outlier Detection

Informative sample selection in active learning (AL) helps a machine learning system attain optimum performance with minimum labeled samples, thus improving human-in-the-loop computer-aided diagnosis systems with limited labeled data. Data augmentation is highly effective for enlarging datasets with less labeled data. Combining informative sample selection and data augmentation should leverage their respective advantages and improve performance of AL systems. We propose a novel approach to combine informative sample selection and data augmentation for multi-label active learning. Conventional informative sample selection approaches have mostly focused on the single-label case which do not perform optimally in the multi-label setting. We improve upon state-of-the-art multi-label active learning techniques by representing disease labels as graph nodes, use graph attention transformers (GAT) to learn more effective inter-label relationships and identify most informative samples. We generate transformations of these informative samples which are also informative. Experiments on public chest xray datasets show improved results over state-of-the-art multi-label AL techniques in terms of classification performance, learning rates, and robustness. We also perform qualitative analysis to determine the realism of generated images.

Constrained Meta-Reinforcement Learning for Adaptable Safety Guarantee with Differentiable Convex Programming

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Long-Term Safe Reinforcement Learning with Binary Feedback

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Constrained Meta-Reinforcement Learning for Adaptable Safety Guarantee with Differentiable Convex Programming

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Long-Term Safe Reinforcement Learning with Binary Feedback

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