Muneeb Aadil

Kiet Q. H. Vo, Muneeb Aadil, Siu Lun Chau et al. · oxford

We study the problem of agent selection in causal strategic learning under multiple decision makers and address two key challenges that come with it. Firstly, while much of prior work focuses on studying a fixed pool of agents that remains static regardless of their evaluations, we consider the impact of selection procedure by which agents are not only evaluated, but also selected. When each decision maker unilaterally selects agents by maximising their own utility, we show that the optimal selection rule is a trade-off between selecting the best agents and providing incentives to maximise the agents' improvement. Furthermore, this optimal selection rule relies on incorrect predictions of agents' outcomes. Hence, we study the conditions under which a decision maker's optimal selection rule will not lead to deterioration of agents' outcome nor cause unjust reduction in agents' selection chance. To that end, we provide an analytical form of the optimal selection rule and a mechanism to retrieve the causal parameters from observational data, under certain assumptions on agents' behaviour. Secondly, when there are multiple decision makers, the interference between selection rules introduces another source of biases in estimating the underlying causal parameters. To address this problem, we provide a cooperative protocol which all decision makers must collectively adopt to recover the true causal parameters. Lastly, we complement our theoretical results with simulation studies. Our results highlight not only the importance of causal modeling as a strategy to mitigate the effect of gaming, as suggested by previous work, but also the need of a benevolent regulator to enable it.

Muhammad Yaseen, Muneeb Aadil, Maria Sargsyan

Since 2014 when Szegedy et al. showed that carefully designed perturbations of the input can lead Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to wrongly classify its label, there has been an ongoing research to make DNNs more robust to such malicious perturbations. In this work, we consider a poisoning attack called Clean Labeling poisoning attack (CLPA). The goal of CLPA is to inject seemingly benign instances which can drastically change decision boundary of the DNNs due to which subsequent queries at test time can be mis-classified. We argue that a strong defense against CLPA can be embedded into the model during the training by imposing features of the network to follow a Large Margin Gaussian Mixture distribution in the penultimate layer. By having such a prior knowledge, we can systematically evaluate how unusual the example is, given the label it is claiming to be. We demonstrate our builtin defense via experiments on MNIST and CIFAR datasets. We train two models on each dataset: one trained via softmax, another via LGM. We show that using LGM can substantially reduce the effectiveness of CLPA while having no additional overhead of data sanitization. The code to reproduce our results is available online.

Muneeb Aadil, Rafia Rahim, Sibt ul Hussain

Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown promising performance in super-resolution (SR). However, these methods operate primarily on Low Resolution (LR) inputs for memory efficiency but this limits, as we demonstrate, their ability to (i) model high frequency information; and (ii) smoothly translate from LR to High Resolution (HR) space. To this end, we propose a novel Incremental Residual Learning (IRL) framework to address these mentioned issues. In IRL, first we select a typical SR pre-trained network as a master branch. Next we sequentially train and add residual branches to the main branch, where each residual branch is learned to model accumulated residuals of all previous branches. We plug state of the art methods in IRL framework and demonstrate consistent performance improvement on public benchmark datasets to set a new state of the art for SR at only approximately 20% increase in training time.