Fangcheng Liu

Fangcheng Liu, Chao Zhang, Hongyang Zhang

Transfer-based adversarial example is one of the most important classes of black-box attacks. However, there is a trade-off between transferability and imperceptibility of the adversarial perturbation. Prior work in this direction often requires a fixed but large $\ell_p$-norm perturbation budget to reach a good transfer success rate, leading to perceptible adversarial perturbations. On the other hand, most of the current unrestricted adversarial attacks that aim to generate semantic-preserving perturbations suffer from weaker transferability to the target model. In this work, we propose a geometry-aware framework to generate transferable adversarial examples with minimum changes. Analogous to model selection in statistical machine learning, we leverage a validation model to select the best perturbation budget for each image under both the $\ell_{\infty}$-norm and unrestricted threat models. We propose a principled method for the partition of training and validation models by encouraging intra-group diversity while penalizing extra-group similarity. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our framework on balancing imperceptibility and transferability of the crafted adversarial examples. The methodology is the foundation of our entry to the CVPR'21 Security AI Challenger: Unrestricted Adversarial Attacks on ImageNet, in which we ranked 1st place out of 1,559 teams and surpassed the runner-up submissions by 4.59% and 23.91% in terms of final score and average image quality level, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/Equationliu/GA-Attack.

Yunhe Wang, Hanting Chen, Yehui Tang et al.

The recent trend of large language models (LLMs) is to increase the scale of both model size (\aka the number of parameters) and dataset to achieve better generative ability, which is definitely proved by a lot of work such as the famous GPT and Llama. However, large models often involve massive computational costs, and practical applications cannot afford such high prices. However, the method of constructing a strong model architecture for LLMs is rarely discussed. We first analyze the state-of-the-art language model architectures and observe the feature collapse problem. Based on the theoretical analysis, we propose that the nonlinearity is also very important for language models, which is usually studied in convolutional neural networks for vision tasks. The series informed activation function is then introduced with tiny calculations that can be ignored, and an augmented shortcut is further used to enhance the model nonlinearity. We then demonstrate that the proposed approach is significantly effective for enhancing the model nonlinearity through carefully designed ablations; thus, we present a new efficient model architecture for establishing modern, namely, PanGu-$π$. Experiments are then conducted using the same dataset and training strategy to compare PanGu-$π$ with state-of-the-art LLMs. The results show that PanGu-$π$-7B can achieve a comparable performance to that of benchmarks with about 10\% inference speed-up, and PanGu-$π$-1B can achieve state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy and efficiency. In addition, we have deployed PanGu-$π$-7B in the high-value domains of finance and law, developing an LLM named YunShan for practical application. The results show that YunShan can surpass other models with similar scales on benchmarks.

Yehui Tang, Yichun Yin, Yaoyuan Wang et al.

Sparse large language models (LLMs) with Mixture of Experts (MoE) and close to a trillion parameters are dominating the realm of most capable language models. However, the massive model scale poses significant challenges for the underlying software and hardware systems. In this paper, we aim to uncover a recipe to harness such scale on Ascend NPUs. The key goals are better usage of the computing resources under the dynamic sparse model structures and materializing the expected performance gain on the actual hardware. To select model configurations suitable for Ascend NPUs without repeatedly running the expensive experiments, we leverage simulation to compare the trade-off of various model hyperparameters. This study led to Pangu Ultra MoE, a sparse LLM with 718 billion parameters, and we conducted experiments on the model to verify the simulation results. On the system side, we dig into Expert Parallelism to optimize the communication between NPU devices to reduce the synchronization overhead. We also optimize the memory efficiency within the devices to further reduce the parameter and activation management overhead. In the end, we achieve an MFU of 30.0% when training Pangu Ultra MoE, with performance comparable to that of DeepSeek R1, on 6K Ascend NPUs, and demonstrate that the Ascend system is capable of harnessing all the training stages of the state-of-the-art language models. Extensive experiments indicate that our recipe can lead to efficient training of large-scale sparse language models with MoE. We also study the behaviors of such models for future reference.

Yuefeng Chen, Xiaofeng Mao, Yuan He et al.

Many works have investigated the adversarial attacks or defenses under the settings where a bounded and imperceptible perturbation can be added to the input. However in the real-world, the attacker does not need to comply with this restriction. In fact, more threats to the deep model come from unrestricted adversarial examples, that is, the attacker makes large and visible modifications on the image, which causes the model classifying mistakenly, but does not affect the normal observation in human perspective. Unrestricted adversarial attack is a popular and practical direction but has not been studied thoroughly. We organize this competition with the purpose of exploring more effective unrestricted adversarial attack algorithm, so as to accelerate the academical research on the model robustness under stronger unbounded attacks. The competition is held on the TianChi platform (\url{https://tianchi.aliyun.com/competition/entrance/531853/introduction}) as one of the series of AI Security Challengers Program.