Thanh Nguyen

Toan Pham Van, Linh Bao Doan, Thanh Tung Nguyen et al.

Semantic segmentation is an essential task in developing medical image diagnosis systems. However, building an annotated medical dataset is expensive. Thus, semi-supervised methods are significant in this circumstance. In semi-supervised learning, the quality of labels plays a crucial role in model performance. In this work, we present a new pseudo labeling strategy that enhances the quality of pseudo labels used for training student networks. We follow the multi-stage semi-supervised training approach, which trains a teacher model on a labeled dataset and then uses the trained teacher to render pseudo labels for student training. By doing so, the pseudo labels will be updated and more precise as training progress. The key difference between previous and our methods is that we update the teacher model during the student training process. So the quality of pseudo labels is improved during the student training process. We also propose a simple but effective strategy to enhance the quality of pseudo labels using a momentum model -- a slow copy version of the original model during training. By applying the momentum model combined with re-rendering pseudo labels during student training, we achieved an average of 84.1% Dice Score on five datasets (i.e., Kvarsir, CVC-ClinicDB, ETIS-LaribPolypDB, CVC-ColonDB, and CVC-300) with only 20% of the dataset used as labeled data. Our results surpass common practice by 3% and even approach fully-supervised results on some datasets. Our source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/sun-asterisk-research/online learning ssl

Tung M. Luu, Haeyong Kang, Tri Ton et al.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents demonstrating proficiency in a training environment exhibit vulnerability to adversarial perturbations in input observations during deployment. This underscores the importance of building a robust agent before its real-world deployment. To alleviate the challenging point, prior works focus on developing robust training-based procedures, encompassing efforts to fortify the deep neural network component's robustness or subject the agent to adversarial training against potent attacks. In this work, we propose a novel method referred to as Transformed Input-robust RL (TIRL), which explores another avenue to mitigate the impact of adversaries by employing input transformation-based defenses. Specifically, we introduce two principles for applying transformation-based defenses in learning robust RL agents: (1) autoencoder-styled denoising to reconstruct the original state and (2) bounded transformations (bit-depth reduction and vector quantization (VQ)) to achieve close transformed inputs. The transformations are applied to the state before feeding it into the policy network. Extensive experiments on multiple MuJoCo environments demonstrate that input transformation-based defenses, i.e., VQ, defend against several adversaries in the state observations. The official code is available at https://github.com/tunglm2203/tirl

Thanh Nguyen, Tung M. Luu, Tri Ton et al.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) addresses the challenge of expensive and high-risk data exploration inherent in RL by pre-training policies on vast amounts of offline data, enabling direct deployment or fine-tuning in real-world environments. However, this training paradigm can compromise policy robustness, leading to degraded performance in practical conditions due to observation perturbations or intentional attacks. While adversarial attacks and defenses have been extensively studied in deep learning, their application in offline RL is limited. This paper proposes a framework to enhance the robustness of offline RL models by leveraging advanced adversarial attacks and defenses. The framework attacks the actor and critic components by perturbing observations during training and using adversarial defenses as regularization to enhance the learned policy. Four attacks and two defenses are introduced and evaluated on the D4RL benchmark. The results show the vulnerability of both the actor and critic to attacks and the effectiveness of the defenses in improving policy robustness. This framework holds promise for enhancing the reliability of offline RL models in practical scenarios.