United States

We present a new algorithm to train a robust malware detector. Malware is a prolific problem and malware detectors are a front-line defense. Modern detectors rely on machine learning algorithms. Now, the adversarial objective is to devise alterations to the malware code to decrease the chance of being detected whilst preserving the functionality and realism of the malware. Adversarial learning is effective in improving robustness but generating functional and realistic adversarial malware samples is non-trivial. Because: i) in contrast to tasks capable of using gradient-based feedback, adversarial learning in a domain without a differentiable mapping function from the problem space (malware code inputs) to the feature space is hard; and ii) it is difficult to ensure the adversarial malware is realistic and functional. 
This presents a challenge for developing scalable adversarial machine learning algorithms for large datasets at a production or commercial scale to realize robust malware detectors. We propose an alternative; perform adversarial learning in the feature space in contrast to the problem space. We prove the projection of perturbed, yet valid malware, in the problem space into feature space will always be a subset of adversarials generated in the feature space. Hence, by generating a robust network against feature-space adversarial examples, we inherently achieve robustness against problem-space adversarial examples. We formulate a Bayesian adversarial learning objective that captures the distribution of models for improved robustness. 
To explain the robustness of the Bayesian adversarial learning algorithm, we prove that our learning method bounds the difference between the adversarial risk and empirical risk and improves robustness. We show that Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) achieve state-of-the-art results; especially in the False Positive Rate (FPR) regime. Adversarially trained BNNs achieve state-of-the-art robustness. Notably, adversarially trained BNNs are robust against stronger attacks with larger attack budgets by a margin of up to 15% on a recent production-scale malware dataset of more than 20~million samples. Importantly, our efforts create a benchmark for future defenses in the malware domain.

AAAI 2023

Feature-Space Bayesian Adversarial Learning Improved Malware Detector Robustness

malware detector

deep neural network

robustness

adversarial

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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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.

poster

It is now well known that neural networks can be wrong with high confidence in their predictions, leading to poor calibration. The most common post-hoc approach to compensate for this is to perform temperature scaling, which adjusts the confidences of the predictions on any input by scaling the logits by a fixed value. Whilst this approach typically improves the average calibration across the whole test dataset, this improvement typically reduces the individual confidences of the predictions irrespective of whether the classification of a given input is correct or incorrect. With this insight, we base our method on the observation that different samples contribute to the calibration error by varying amounts, with some needing to increase their confidence and others needing to decrease it. Therefore, for each input, we propose to predict a different temperature value, allowing us to adjust the mismatch between confidence and accuracy at a finer granularity. Furthermore, we observe improved results on OOD detection and can also extract a notion of hardness for the data-points. Our method is applied post-hoc, consequently using very little computation time and with a negligible memory footprint and is applied to off-the-shelf pre-trained classifiers. We test our method on the ResNet50 and WideResNet28-10 architectures using the CIFAR10/100 and Tiny-ImageNet datasets, showing that producing per-data-point temperatures is beneficial also for the expected calibration error across the whole test set. Code is available at: this https URL.

Sample-dependent Adaptive Temperature Scaling for Improved Calibration

We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) modeling an agent that needs a supply of a certain resource (e.g. electricity stored in batteries) to operate safely. The resource is consumed by agent's action and can be replenished only in certain states. The agent aims to minimize the expected cost of reaching some goal while preventing resource exhaustion, a problem we call resource-safe goal optimization (RSGO). We take a two-step approach to the RSGO problem. First, using formal methods techniques, we design an algorithm computing a shield for a given scenario: a procedure that observes the agent and prevents it from using unsafe actions that might eventually lead to resource exhaustion. Second, we augment the POMCP heuristic search algorithm for POMDP planning with our shields to obtain an algorithm solving the RSGO problem. We implement our algorithm and present experiments showing its applicability to benchmarks from the literature.

Shielding in Resource-Constrained Goal POMDPs

Adversarial training (AT) methods are effective against adversarial attacks, yet they introduce severe disparity of accuracy and robustness between different classes, which is known as the robust fairness problem. Previously proposed Fair Robust Learning (FRL) adds regularization terms to penalize unfairness, but the performance on the better performed classes are decreased, leading to strong performance drop. In this paper, we observed two unfair phenomena during adversarial training: different difficulties in generating adversarial examples from each class (source-class fairness) and disparate target class tendencies when generating adversarial examples (target-class fairness). From the observations, we propose Balance Adversarial Training (BAT) to address the robust fairness problem. Regarding source-class fairness, we adjust the attack strength and difficulties of each class to generate samples near the decision boundary for easier and fairer model learning; considering target-class fairness, we encourage the adversarial example generation process towards each class with a fair tendency by introducing a uniform distribution constraint. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNette) demonstrate that our method can significantly outperform other baselines in mitigating the robust fairness problem (+5-10\% on the worst class accuracy)

Improving Robust Fariness via Balance Adversarial Training

Despite being widely deployed in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and health care, deep neural networks (DNNs) still suffer from non-negligible reliability issues. Numerous works had reported that DNNs were vulnerable to either natural environmental noises or man-made adversarial noises.
How to repair DNNs in deployment with noisy samples is a crucial topic for the robustness of neural networks. While many network repairing methods based on data argumentation and weight adjustment have been proposed, they require retraining and redeploying the whole model, which causes high overhead and are infeasible for varying faulty cases on different deployment environments. In this paper, we propose a novel network repairing framework called PatchNAS from the architecture perspective, where we freeze the pretrained DNNs and introduce a small patch network to deal with failure samples at runtime. PatchNAS introduces a novel network instrumentation method to determine the faulty stage of the network structure given the collected failure samples. A small patch network structure is searched unsupervisedly using neural architecture search (NAS) technique with data samples from deployment environment.	The patch network repairs the DNNs by correcting the output feature maps of the faulty stage, which helps to maintain network performance on normal samples and enhance robustness in noisy environments. 	Extensive experiments based on several DNNs across 15 types of natural noises show that the proposed PatchNAS outperforms the state-of-the-arts with significant performance improvement as well as much lower deployment overhead.

PatchNAS: Repairing DNNs in Deployment with Patched Network Architecture Search

Information leakage is becoming a critical problem as various information becomes publicly available by mistake, and machine learning models train on that data to provide services. As a result, one's private information could easily be memorized by such trained models. Unfortunately, deleting information is out of the question as the data is already exposed to the Web or third-party platforms. Moreover, we cannot necessarily control the labeling process and the model trainings by other parties either. In this setting, we study the problem of targeted disinformation generation where the goal is to dilute the data and thus make a model safer and more robust against inference attacks on a specific target (e.g., a person's profile) by only inserting new data. Our method finds the closest points to the target in the input space that will be labeled as a different class. Since we cannot control the labeling process, we instead conservatively estimate the labels probabilistically by combining decision boundaries of multiple classifiers using data programming techniques. Our experiments show that a probabilistic decision boundary can be a good proxy for labelers, and that our approach is effective in defending against inference attacks and can scale to large data.

Redactor: A Data-centric and Individualized Defense Against Inference Attacks

Rising usage of deep neural networks to perform decision making in critical applications like medical diagnosis and fi- nancial analysis have raised concerns regarding their reliability and trustworthiness. As automated systems become more mainstream, it is important their decisions be transparent, reliable and understandable by humans for better trust and confidence. To this effect, concept-based models such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) and Self-Explaining Neural Networks (SENN) have been proposed which constrain the latent space of a model to represent high level concepts easily understood by domain experts in the field. Although concept-based models promise a good approach to both increasing explainability and reliability, it is yet to be shown if they demonstrate robustness and output consistent concepts under systematic perturbations to their inputs. To better understand performance of concept-based models on curated malicious samples, in this paper, we aim to study their robustness to adversarial perturbations, which are also known as the imperceptible changes to the input data that are crafted by an attacker to fool a well-learned concept-based model. Specifically, we first propose and analyze different malicious attacks to evaluate the security vulnerability of concept based models. Subsequently, we propose a potential general adversarial training-based defense mechanism to increase robustness of these systems to the proposed malicious attacks. Extensive experiments on one synthetic and two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attacks and the defense approach.

Understanding and Enhancing Robustness of Concept-based Models

Deep Neural Networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Among many defense strategies, adversarial training with untargeted attacks is one of the most effective methods. Theoretically, adversarial perturbation in untargeted attacks can be added along arbitrary directions and the predicted labels of untargeted attacks should be unpredictable. However, we find that the naturally imbalanced inter-class semantic similarity makes those hard-class pairs become virtual targets of each other. This study investigates the impact of such closely-coupled classes on adversarial attacks and develops a self-paced reweighting strategy in adversarial training accordingly. Specifically, we propose to upweight hard-class pair losses in model optimization, which prompts learning discriminative features from hard classes. We further incorporate a term to quantify hard-class pair consistency in adversarial training, which greatly boosts model robustness. Extensive experiments show that the proposed adversarial training method achieves superior robustness performance over state-of-the-art defenses against a wide range of adversarial attacks. The code of the proposed SPAT is published at https://github.com/puerrrr/Self-Paced-Adversarial-Training.

Improving Adversarial Robustness with Self-Paced Hard-Class Pair Reweighting

Federated learning (FL) has gained significant attention recently as a privacy-enhancing tool to jointly train a machine learning model by multiple participants. 
The prior work on FL has mostly studied how to protect label privacy during model training. However, model evaluation in FL might also lead to potential leakage of private label information.
In this work, we propose an evaluation algorithm that can  accurately compute the widely used AUC (area under the curve) metric when using the label differential privacy (DP) in FL. Through extensive experiments, we show our algorithms can compute accurate AUCs compared to the ground truth. The code is available at {\url{https://github.com/bytedance/fedlearner/tree/master/example/privacy/DPAUC}}

DPAUC: Differentially Private AUC Computation in Federated Learning

The partially occluded image recognition (POIR) problem has been a challenge for artificial intelligence for a long time. A common strategy to handle the POIR problem is using the non-occluded features for classification. Unfortunately, this strategy will lose effectiveness when the image is severely occluded, since the visible parts can only provide limited information. Several studies in neuroscience reveal that feature restoration which fills in the occluded information and is called amodal completion is essential for human brains to recognize partially occluded images. However, feature restoration is commonly ignored by CNNs, which may be the reason why CNNs are ineffective for the POIR problem. Inspired by this, we propose a novel brain-inspired feature restoration network (BIFRNet) to solve the POIR problem. It mimics a ventral visual pathway to extract image features and a dorsal visual pathway to distinguish occluded and visible image regions. In addition, it also uses a knowledge module to store classification prior knowledge and uses a completion module to restore occluded features based on visible features and prior knowledge. Thorough experiments on synthetic and real-world occluded image datasets show that BIFRNet outperforms the existing methods in solving the POIR problem. Especially for severely occluded images, BIRFRNet surpasses other methods by a large margin and is close to the human brain performance. Furthermore, the brain-inspired design makes BIFRNet more interpretable.

BIFRNet A Brain-Inspired Feature Restoration DNN for Partially Occluded Image Recognition

Procuring expressive molecular representations underpins AI-driven molecule design and scientific discovery. The research mainly focuses on atom-level homogeneous molecular graphs, ignoring the rich information in subgraphs or motifs. However, it has been widely accepted that substructures play a dominant role in identifying and determining molecular properties. To address such issues, we formulate heterogeneous molecular graphs (HMGs) and introduce a novel architecture to exploit both molecular motifs and 3D geometry. Precisely, we extract functional groups as motifs for small molecules and employ reinforcement learning to adaptively select quaternary amino acids as motif candidates for proteins. Then HMGs are constructed with both atom-level and motif-level nodes. To better accommodate those HMGs, we introduce a variant of Transformer named Molformer, which adopts a heterogeneous self-attention layer to distinguish the interactions between multi-level nodes. Besides, it is also coupled with a multi-scale mechanism to capture fine-grained local patterns with increasing contextual scales. An attentive farthest point sampling algorithm is also proposed to obtain the molecular representations. We validate Molformer across a broad range of domains, including quantum chemistry, physiology, and biophysics. Extensive experiments show that Molformer outperforms or achieves the comparable performance of several state-of-the-art baselines. Our work provides a promising way to utilize informative motifs from the perspective of multi-level graph construction. 

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Feature-Space Bayesian Adversarial Learning Improved Malware Detector Robustness

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