Lin Li

Lin Li, Michael Spratling

Adversarial training suffers from the issue of robust overfitting, which seriously impairs its generalization performance. Data augmentation, which is effective at preventing overfitting in standard training, has been observed by many previous works to be ineffective in mitigating overfitting in adversarial training. This work proves that, contrary to previous findings, data augmentation alone can significantly boost accuracy and robustness in adversarial training. We find that the hardness and the diversity of data augmentation are important factors in combating robust overfitting. In general, diversity can improve both accuracy and robustness, while hardness can boost robustness at the cost of accuracy within a certain limit and degrade them both over that limit. To mitigate robust overfitting, we first propose a new crop transformation, Cropshift, which has improved diversity compared to the conventional one (Padcrop). We then propose a new data augmentation scheme, based on Cropshift, with much improved diversity and well-balanced hardness. Empirically, our augmentation method achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness for data augmentations in adversarial training. Furthermore, when combined with weight averaging it matches, or even exceeds, the performance of the best contemporary regularization methods for alleviating robust overfitting. Code is available at: https://github.com/TreeLLi/DA-Alone-Improves-AT.

Shu'ang Li, Xuming Hu, Li Lin et al. · tsinghua

Natural Language Inference (NLI) is a growingly essential task in natural language understanding, which requires inferring the relationship between the sentence pairs (premise and hypothesis). Recently, low-resource natural language inference has gained increasing attention, due to significant savings in manual annotation costs and a better fit with real-world scenarios. Existing works fail to characterize discriminative representations between different classes with limited training data, which may cause faults in label prediction. Here we propose a multi-level supervised contrastive learning framework named MultiSCL for low-resource natural language inference. MultiSCL leverages a sentence-level and pair-level contrastive learning objective to discriminate between different classes of sentence pairs by bringing those in one class together and pushing away those in different classes. MultiSCL adopts a data augmentation module that generates different views for input samples to better learn the latent representation. The pair-level representation is obtained from a cross attention module. We conduct extensive experiments on two public NLI datasets in low-resource settings, and the accuracy of MultiSCL exceeds other models by 3.1% on average. Moreover, our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method on cross-domain tasks of text classification.

Jianhua Wang, Xiaolin Chang, Jelena Mišić et al.

Federated Learning (FL), a privacy-oriented distributed ML paradigm, is being gaining great interest in Internet of Things because of its capability to protect participants data privacy. Studies have been conducted to address challenges existing in standard FL, including communication efficiency and privacy-preserving. But they cannot achieve the goal of making a tradeoff between communication efficiency and model accuracy while guaranteeing privacy. This paper proposes a Conditional Random Sampling (CRS) method and implements it into the standard FL settings (CRS-FL) to tackle the above-mentioned challenges. CRS explores a stochastic coefficient based on Poisson sampling to achieve a higher probability of obtaining zero-gradient unbiasedly, and then decreases the communication overhead effectively without model accuracy degradation. Moreover, we dig out the relaxation Local Differential Privacy (LDP) guarantee conditions of CRS theoretically. Extensive experiment results indicate that (1) in communication efficiency, CRS-FL performs better than the existing methods in metric accuracy per transmission byte without model accuracy reduction in more than 7% sampling ratio (# sampling size / # model size); (2) in privacy-preserving, CRS-FL achieves no accuracy reduction compared with LDP baselines while holding the efficiency, even exceeding them in model accuracy under more sampling ratio conditions.