Andrew August

Shrirang Abhyankar, Jan Drgona, Andrew August et al.

In this work, we investigate a data-driven approach for obtaining a reduced equivalent load model of distribution systems for electromechanical transient stability analysis. The proposed reduced equivalent is a neuro-physical model comprising of a traditional ZIP load model augmented with a neural network. This neuro-physical model is trained through differentiable programming. We discuss the formulation, modeling details, and training of the proposed model set up as a differential parametric program. The performance and accuracy of this neurophysical ZIP load model is presented on a medium-scale 350-bus transmission-distribution network.

Loc Truong, Chace Jones, Brian Hutchinson et al.

Backdoor data poisoning attacks have recently been demonstrated in computer vision research as a potential safety risk for machine learning (ML) systems. Traditional data poisoning attacks manipulate training data to induce unreliability of an ML model, whereas backdoor data poisoning attacks maintain system performance unless the ML model is presented with an input containing an embedded "trigger" that provides a predetermined response advantageous to the adversary. Our work builds upon prior backdoor data-poisoning research for ML image classifiers and systematically assesses different experimental conditions including types of trigger patterns, persistence of trigger patterns during retraining, poisoning strategies, architectures (ResNet-50, NasNet, NasNet-Mobile), datasets (Flowers, CIFAR-10), and potential defensive regularization techniques (Contrastive Loss, Logit Squeezing, Manifold Mixup, Soft-Nearest-Neighbors Loss). Experiments yield four key findings. First, the success rate of backdoor poisoning attacks varies widely, depending on several factors, including model architecture, trigger pattern and regularization technique. Second, we find that poisoned models are hard to detect through performance inspection alone. Third, regularization typically reduces backdoor success rate, although it can have no effect or even slightly increase it, depending on the form of regularization. Finally, backdoors inserted through data poisoning can be rendered ineffective after just a few epochs of additional training on a small set of clean data without affecting the model's performance.