Junghyun Lee

Yassir Jedra, Junghyun Lee, Alexandre Proutière et al.

We investigate the problems of model estimation and reward-free learning in episodic Block MDPs. In these MDPs, the decision maker has access to rich observations or contexts generated from a small number of latent states. We are first interested in estimating the latent state decoding function (the mapping from the observations to latent states) based on data generated under a fixed behavior policy. We derive an information-theoretical lower bound on the error rate for estimating this function and present an algorithm approaching this fundamental limit. In turn, our algorithm also provides estimates of all the components of the MDP. We then study the problem of learning near-optimal policies in the reward-free framework. Based on our efficient model estimation algorithm, we show that we can infer a policy converging (as the number of collected samples grows large) to the optimal policy at the best possible rate. Interestingly, our analysis provides necessary and sufficient conditions under which exploiting the block structure yields improvements in the sample complexity for identifying near-optimal policies. When these conditions are met, the sample complexity in the minimax reward-free setting is improved by a multiplicative factor $n$, where $n$ is the number of possible contexts.

Giyeong Oh, Junghyun Lee, Jaehyun Park et al.

Modern LLMs inherit strong priors from web-scale pretraining, which can limit the headroom of post-training data-selection strategies. While Active Preference Learning (APL) seeks to optimize query efficiency in online Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), the inherent richness of on-policy candidate pools often renders simple Random sampling a surprisingly formidable baseline. We evaluate uncertainty-based APL against Random across harmlessness, helpfulness, and instruction-following settings, utilizing both reward models and LLM-as-a-judge proxies. We find that APL yields negligible improvements in proxy win-rates compared to Random. Crucially, we observe a dissociation where win-rate improves even as general capability -- measured by standard benchmarks -- degrades. APL fails to mitigate this capability collapse or reduce variance significantly better than random sampling. Our findings suggest that in the regime of strong pre-trained priors, the computational overhead of active selection is difficult to justify against the ``cheap diversity'' provided by simple random samples. Our code is available at https://github.com/BootsofLagrangian/random-vs-apl.

Junghyun Lee, Eunsang Lee, Young-Sik Kim et al.

Recent studies have explored the deployment of privacy-preserving deep neural networks utilizing homomorphic encryption (HE), especially for private inference (PI). Many works have attempted the approximation-aware training (AAT) approach in PI, changing the activation functions of a model to low-degree polynomials that are easier to compute on HE by allowing model retraining. However, due to constraints in the training environment, it is often necessary to consider post-training approximation (PTA), using the pre-trained parameters of the existing plaintext model without retraining. Existing PTA studies have uniformly approximated the activation function in all layers to a high degree to mitigate accuracy loss from approximation, leading to significant time consumption. This study proposes an optimized layerwise approximation (OLA), a systematic framework that optimizes both accuracy loss and time consumption by using different approximation polynomials for each layer in the PTA scenario. For efficient approximation, we reflect the layerwise impact on the classification accuracy by considering the actual input distribution of each activation function while constructing the optimization problem. Additionally, we provide a dynamic programming technique to solve the optimization problem and achieve the optimized layerwise degrees in polynomial time. As a result, the OLA method reduces inference times for the ResNet-20 model and the ResNet-32 model by 3.02 times and 2.82 times, respectively, compared to prior state-of-the-art implementations employing uniform degree polynomials. Furthermore, we successfully classified CIFAR-10 by replacing the GELU function in the ConvNeXt model with only 3-degree polynomials using the proposed method, without modifying the backbone model.

Junghyun Lee, Branislav Kveton, Sunav Choudhary et al.

Large language models (LLMs) solve reasoning problems by first generating a rationale and then answering. We formalize reasoning as a latent variable model and derive an expectation-maximization (EM) objective for learning to reason. This view connects EM and modern reward-based optimization, and shows that the main challenge lies in designing a sampling distribution that generates rationales that justify correct answers. We instantiate and compare several sampling schemes: rejection sampling with a budget, self-taught reasoner (STaR), and prompt posterior sampling (PPS), which only keeps the rationalization stage of STaR. Our experiments on the ARC, MMLU, and OpenBookQA datasets with the Llama and Qwen models show that the sampling scheme can significantly affect the accuracy of learned reasoning models. Despite its simplicity, we observe that PPS outperforms the other sampling schemes.

Prin Phunyaphibarn, Junghyun Lee, Bohan Wang et al.

Although gradient descent with Polyak's momentum is widely used in modern machine and deep learning, a concrete understanding of its effects on the training trajectory remains elusive. In this work, we empirically show that for linear diagonal networks and nonlinear neural networks, momentum gradient descent with a large learning rate displays large catapults, driving the iterates towards much flatter minima than those found by gradient descent. We hypothesize that the large catapult is caused by momentum "prolonging" the self-stabilization effect (Damian et al., 2023). We provide theoretical and empirical support for our hypothesis in a simple toy example and empirical evidence supporting our hypothesis for linear diagonal networks.

Junghyun Lee, Sanghwa Kim, Yassir Jedra et al.

Evaluating large language models increasingly relies on LLM-as-a-judge protocols, but such evaluations remain costly: different judges have different prices and reliabilities, and the difficulty of each prompt-response pair can vary substantially. This raises a basic allocation question: under a fixed budget, how should one distribute evaluation queries across heterogeneous judges and instances to obtain the most accurate score estimates? We formalize this question as *budgeted heteroskedastic multi-judge estimation*. Given $K$ prompt-response pairs, $J$ judges with known costs, and unknown query-judge variances, the goal is to estimate a bounded score vector while minimizing an $\ell_p$-error. Our first contribution is to analyze the inverse-variance weighted estimator (IVWE) and to derive the oracle allocation that minimizes its error rate. Since this allocation depends on the unknown variances, we then address the practical unknown-variance setting by proposing EST-IVWE, an adaptive algorithm that constructs and leverages *optimistically biased* variance estimates to stabilize the empirical allocation. We prove that EST-IVWE matches the oracle IVWE rate up to lower-order terms in the budget. Our second and central theoretical contribution is a matching *local* minimax lower bound, which establishes the instance-optimality of the proposed algorithms. A key technical insight is that Fano-type high-probability arguments are too coarse for this problem: their packing construction loses the local variance structure that governs the optimal allocation. We instead use an Assouad-type in-expectation argument, based on local perturbations, which preserves this structure and yields the sharp allocation-dependent lower bound. Finally, we numerically validate the superiority of our approach over naïve uniform allocation on synthetic and HelpSteer2 datasets.

Junghyun Lee, Se-Young Yun, Kwang-Sung Jun

Logistic bandit is a ubiquitous framework of modeling users' choices, e.g., click vs. no click for advertisement recommender system. We observe that the prior works overlook or neglect dependencies in $S \geq \lVert θ_\star \rVert_2$, where $θ_\star \in \mathbb{R}^d$ is the unknown parameter vector, which is particularly problematic when $S$ is large, e.g., $S \geq d$. In this work, we improve the dependency on $S$ via a novel approach called {\it regret-to-confidence set conversion (R2CS)}, which allows us to construct a convex confidence set based on only the \textit{existence} of an online learning algorithm with a regret guarantee. Using R2CS, we obtain a strict improvement in the regret bound w.r.t. $S$ in logistic bandits while retaining computational feasibility and the dependence on other factors such as $d$ and $T$. We apply our new confidence set to the regret analyses of logistic bandits with a new martingale concentration step that circumvents an additional factor of $S$. We then extend this analysis to multinomial logistic bandits and obtain similar improvements in the regret, showing the efficacy of R2CS. While we applied R2CS to the (multinomial) logistic model, R2CS is a generic approach for developing confidence sets that can be used for various models, which can be of independent interest.

Junghyun Lee, Se-Young Yun, Kwang-Sung Jun

We present a unified likelihood ratio-based confidence sequence (CS) for any (self-concordant) generalized linear model (GLM) that is guaranteed to be convex and numerically tight. We show that this is on par or improves upon known CSs for various GLMs, including Gaussian, Bernoulli, and Poisson. In particular, for the first time, our CS for Bernoulli has a $\mathrm{poly}(S)$-free radius where $S$ is the norm of the unknown parameter. Our first technical novelty is its derivation, which utilizes a time-uniform PAC-Bayesian bound with a uniform prior/posterior, despite the latter being a rather unpopular choice for deriving CSs. As a direct application of our new CS, we propose a simple and natural optimistic algorithm called OFUGLB, applicable to any generalized linear bandits (GLB; Filippi et al. (2010)). Our analysis shows that the celebrated optimistic approach simultaneously attains state-of-the-art regrets for various self-concordant (not necessarily bounded) GLBs, and even $\mathrm{poly}(S)$-free for bounded GLBs, including logistic bandits. The regret analysis, our second technical novelty, follows from combining our new CS with a new proof technique that completely avoids the previously widely used self-concordant control lemma (Faury et al., 2020, Lemma 9). Numerically, OFUGLB outperforms or is at par with prior algorithms for logistic bandits.

Junghyun Lee, Hyunseo Kim, Hanna Jang et al.

Blended emotion recognition is challenging because emotions are often expressed as mixtures of subtle and overlapping multimodal cues rather than a single dominant signal. We propose a rank-aware multi-encoder framework that selectively combines complementary representations from diverse pre-extracted video and audio encoders. Our method projects heterogeneous encoder features into a shared latent space, estimates sample-wise encoder importance through an attention-based gating module, and fuses only the top-n most informative encoders. To better model blended emotions, we decouple prediction into presence and salience heads and align them through probability-level fusion. We further incorporate feature-level unsupervised domain adaptation without pseudo-labeling to improve robustness under distribution shift. Experiments on the BlEmoRE challenge show that the proposed framework outperforms strong individual encoders and naïve multi-encoder fusion baselines. Our final system ranked 2nd in the competition, supporting the effectiveness of rank-aware selective fusion for fine-grained blended emotion recognition.

Junghyun Lee, Hanseul Cho, Se-Young Yun et al.

Fair Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a problem setting where we aim to perform PCA while making the resulting representation fair in that the projected distributions, conditional on the sensitive attributes, match one another. However, existing approaches to fair PCA have two main problems: theoretically, there has been no statistical foundation of fair PCA in terms of learnability; practically, limited memory prevents us from using existing approaches, as they explicitly rely on full access to the entire data. On the theoretical side, we rigorously formulate fair PCA using a new notion called \emph{probably approximately fair and optimal} (PAFO) learnability. On the practical side, motivated by recent advances in streaming algorithms for addressing memory limitation, we propose a new setting called \emph{fair streaming PCA} along with a memory-efficient algorithm, fair noisy power method (FNPM). We then provide its {\it statistical} guarantee in terms of PAFO-learnability, which is the first of its kind in fair PCA literature. Lastly, we verify the efficacy and memory efficiency of our algorithm on real-world datasets.

Junghyun Lee, Laura Schmid, Se-Young Yun

Multi-armed bandits are extensively used to model sequential decision-making, making them ubiquitous in many real-life applications such as online recommender systems and wireless networking. We consider a multi-agent setting where each agent solves their own bandit instance endowed with a different set of arms. Their goal is to minimize their group regret while collaborating via some communication protocol over a given network. Previous literature on this problem only considered arm heterogeneity and networked agents separately. In this work, we introduce a setting that encompasses both features. For this novel setting, we first provide a rigorous regret analysis for a standard flooding protocol combined with the classic UCB policy. Then, to mitigate the issue of high communication costs incurred by flooding in complex networks, we propose a new protocol called Flooding with Absorption (FwA). We provide a theoretical analysis of the resulting regret bound and discuss the advantages of using FwA over flooding. Lastly, we experimentally verify on various scenarios, including dynamic networks, that FwA leads to significantly lower communication costs despite minimal regret performance loss compared to other network protocols.

Woosung Koh, Wonbeen Oh, Siyeol Kim et al.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning has demonstrated significant potential in addressing complex cooperative tasks across various real-world applications. However, existing MARL approaches often rely on the restrictive assumption that the number of entities (e.g., agents, obstacles) remains constant between training and inference. This overlooks scenarios where entities are dynamically removed or added during the inference trajectory -- a common occurrence in real-world environments like search and rescue missions and dynamic combat situations. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of intra-trajectory dynamic entity composition under zero-shot out-of-domain (OOD) generalization, where such dynamic changes cannot be anticipated beforehand. Our empirical studies reveal that existing MARL methods suffer significant performance degradation and increased uncertainty in these scenarios. In response, we propose FlickerFusion, a novel OOD generalization method that acts as a universally applicable augmentation technique for MARL backbone methods. FlickerFusion stochastically drops out parts of the observation space, emulating being in-domain when inferenced OOD. The results show that FlickerFusion not only achieves superior inference rewards but also uniquely reduces uncertainty vis-à-vis the backbone, compared to existing methods. Benchmarks, implementations, and model weights are organized and open-sourced at flickerfusion305.github.io, accompanied by ample demo video renderings.

Junghyun Lee, Minju Hong, Kwang-Sung Jun et al.

We consider the problem of contextual online RLHF with general preferences, where the goal is to identify the Nash Equilibrium. We adopt the Generalized Bilinear Preference Model (GBPM) to capture potentially intransitive preferences via low-rank, skew-symmetric matrices. We investigate general preference learning with any strongly convex regularizer and regularization strength $η^{-1}$, generalizing beyond prior work limited to reverse KL-regularization. Central to our analysis is proving that the dual gap of the greedy policy is bounded by the square of the estimation error, a result derived solely from strong convexity and the skew-symmetry of GBPM. Building on this insight and a feature diversity assumption, we establish two regret bounds via two simple algorithms: (1) Greedy Sampling achieves polylogarithmic, $e^{\mathcal{O}(η)}$-free regret $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(ηd^4 (\log T)^2)$. (2) Explore-Then-Commit achieves $\mathrm{poly}(d)$-free regret $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{ηr T})$ by exploiting the low-rank structure; this is the first statistically efficient guarantee for online RLHF in high-dimensions.

Sanghwa Kim, Junghyun Lee, Se-Young Yun

We consider the problem of heteroskedastic generalized linear bandits (GLBs) with adversarial corruptions, which subsumes various stochastic contextual bandit settings, including heteroskedastic linear bandits and logistic/Poisson bandits. We propose HCW-GLB-OMD, which consists of two components: an online mirror descent (OMD)-based estimator and Hessian-based confidence weights to achieve corruption robustness. This is computationally efficient in that it only requires ${O}(1)$ space and time complexity per iteration. Under the self-concordance assumption on the link function, we show a regret bound of $\tilde{O}\left( d \sqrt{\sum_t g(τ_t) \dotμ_{t,\star}} + d^2 g_{\max} κ+ d κC \right)$, where $\dotμ_{t,\star}$ is the slope of $μ$ around the optimal arm at time $t$, $g(τ_t)$'s are potentially exogenously time-varying dispersions (e.g., $g(τ_t) = σ_t^2$ for heteroskedastic linear bandits, $g(τ_t) = 1$ for Bernoulli and Poisson), $g_{\max} = \max_{t \in [T]} g(τ_t)$ is the maximum dispersion, and $C \geq 0$ is the total corruption budget of the adversary. We complement this with a lower bound of $\tildeΩ(d \sqrt{\sum_t g(τ_t) \dotμ_{t,\star}} + d C)$, unifying previous problem-specific lower bounds. Thus, our algorithm achieves, up to a $κ$-factor in the corruption term, instance-wise minimax optimality simultaneously across various instances of heteroskedastic GLBs with adversarial corruptions.

Junghyun Lee, Kyoungseok Jang, Kwang-Sung Jun et al.

We present `GL-LowPopArt`, a novel Catoni-style estimator for generalized low-rank trace regression. Building on `LowPopArt` (Jang et al., 2024), it employs a two-stage approach: nuclear norm regularization followed by matrix Catoni estimation. We establish state-of-the-art estimation error bounds, surpassing existing guarantees (Fan et al., 2019; Kang et al., 2022), and reveal a novel experimental design objective, $\mathrm{GL}(π)$. The key technical challenge is controlling bias from the nonlinear inverse link function, which we address by our two-stage approach. We prove a *local* minimax lower bound, showing that our `GL-LowPopArt` enjoys instance-wise optimality up to the condition number of the ground-truth Hessian. Applications include generalized linear matrix completion, where `GL-LowPopArt` achieves a state-of-the-art Frobenius error guarantee, and **bilinear dueling bandits**, a novel setting inspired by general preference learning (Zhang et al., 2024). Our analysis of a `GL-LowPopArt`-based explore-then-commit algorithm reveals a new, potentially interesting problem-dependent quantity, along with improved Borda regret bound than vectorization (Wu et al., 2024).

Junghyun Lee, Yassir Jedra, Alexandre Proutière et al.

We study the problem of clustering $T$ trajectories of length $H$, each generated by one of $K$ unknown ergodic Markov chains over a finite state space of size $S$. The goal is to accurately group trajectories according to their underlying generative model. We begin by deriving an instance-dependent, high-probability lower bound on the clustering error rate, governed by the weighted KL divergence between the transition kernels of the chains. We then present a novel two-stage clustering algorithm. In Stage~I, we apply spectral clustering using a new injective Euclidean embedding for ergodic Markov chains -- a contribution of independent interest that enables sharp concentration results. Stage~II refines the initial clusters via a single step of likelihood-based reassignment. Our method achieves a near-optimal clustering error with high probability, under the conditions $H = \tildeΩ(γ_{\mathrm{ps}}^{-1} (S^2 \vee π_{\min}^{-1}))$ and $TH = \tildeΩ(γ_{\mathrm{ps}}^{-1} S^2 )$, where $π_{\min}$ is the minimum stationary probability of a state across the $K$ chains and $γ_{\mathrm{ps}}$ is the minimum pseudo-spectral gap. These requirements provide significant improvements, if not at least comparable, to the state-of-the-art guarantee (Kausik et al., 2023), and moreover, our algorithm offers a key practical advantage: unlike existing approach, it requires no prior knowledge of model-specific quantities (e.g., separation between kernels or visitation probabilities). We conclude by discussing the inherent gap between our upper and lower bounds, providing insights into the unique structure of this clustering problem.

Woosung Koh, Wonbeen Oh, Jaein Jang et al.

Self-Taught Reasoners (STaR), synonymously known as Rejection sampling Fine-Tuning (RFT), is an integral part of the training pipeline of self-improving reasoning Language Models (LMs). The self-improving mechanism often employs random observation (data) sampling. However, this results in trained observation imbalance; inefficiently over-training on solved examples while under-training on challenging ones. In response, we introduce Adaptive STaR (AdaSTaR), a novel algorithm that rectifies this by integrating two adaptive sampling principles: (1) Adaptive Sampling for Diversity: promoting balanced training across observations, and (2) Adaptive Sampling for Curriculum: dynamically adjusting data difficulty to match the model's evolving strength. Across six benchmarks, AdaSTaR achieves best test accuracy in all instances (6/6) and reduces training FLOPs by an average of 58.6% against an extensive list of baselines. These improvements in performance and efficiency generalize to different pre-trained LMs and larger models, paving the way for more efficient and effective self-improving LMs.

Kunwoo Na, Junghyun Lee, Se-Young Yun et al.

Recent advances in infinite-dimensional diffusion models have demonstrated their effectiveness and scalability in function generation tasks where the underlying structure is inherently infinite-dimensional. To accelerate inference in such models, we derive, for the first time, an analog of the probability-flow ODE (PF-ODE) in infinite-dimensional function spaces. Leveraging this newly formulated PF-ODE, we reduce the number of function evaluations while maintaining sample quality in function generation tasks, including applications to PDEs.

Heecheol Yun, Kwangmin Ki, Junghyun Lee et al.

Ensembling Large Language Models (LLMs) has gained attention as a promising approach to surpass the performance of individual models by leveraging their complementary strengths. In particular, aggregating models' next-token probability distributions to select the next token has been shown to be effective in various tasks. However, while successful for short-form answers, its application to long-form generation remains underexplored. In this paper, we show that using existing ensemble methods in long-form generation requires a careful choice of ensembling positions, since the standard practice of ensembling at every token often degrades performance. We identify two key factors for determining these positions: tokenization mismatch across models and consensus in their next-token probability distributions. Based on this, we propose SAFE, (Stable And Fast LLM Ensembling), a framework that selectively ensembles by jointly considering these factors. To further improve stability, we introduce a probability sharpening strategy that consolidates probabilities spread across multiple sub-word tokens representing the same word into a single representative token. Our experiments on diverse benchmarks, including MATH500 and BBH, demonstrate that SAFE outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and efficiency, with gains achieved even when ensembling fewer than 1% of tokens.

Seong Jin Cho, Gwangsu Kim, Junghyun Lee et al.

Active learning is a machine learning paradigm that aims to improve the performance of a model by strategically selecting and querying unlabeled data. One effective selection strategy is to base it on the model's predictive uncertainty, which can be interpreted as a measure of how informative a sample is. The sample's distance to the decision boundary is a natural measure of predictive uncertainty, but it is often intractable to compute, especially for complex decision boundaries formed in multiclass classification tasks. To address this issue, this paper proposes the {\it least disagree metric} (LDM), defined as the smallest probability of disagreement of the predicted label, and an estimator for LDM proven to be asymptotically consistent under mild assumptions. The estimator is computationally efficient and can be easily implemented for deep learning models using parameter perturbation. The LDM-based active learning is performed by querying unlabeled data with the smallest LDM. Experimental results show that our LDM-based active learning algorithm obtains state-of-the-art overall performance on all considered datasets and deep architectures.

Junghyun Lee, Gwangsu Kim, Matt Olfat et al.

This paper defines fair principal component analysis (PCA) as minimizing the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) between dimensionality-reduced conditional distributions of different protected classes. The incorporation of MMD naturally leads to an exact and tractable mathematical formulation of fairness with good statistical properties. We formulate the problem of fair PCA subject to MMD constraints as a non-convex optimization over the Stiefel manifold and solve it using the Riemannian Exact Penalty Method with Smoothing (REPMS; Liu and Boumal, 2019). Importantly, we provide local optimality guarantees and explicitly show the theoretical effect of each hyperparameter in practical settings, extending previous results. Experimental comparisons based on synthetic and UCI datasets show that our approach outperforms prior work in explained variance, fairness, and runtime.

Joon-Woo Lee, HyungChul Kang, Yongwoo Lee et al.

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is one of the prospective tools for privacypreserving machine learning (PPML), and several PPML models have been proposed based on various FHE schemes and approaches. Although the FHE schemes are known as suitable tools to implement PPML models, previous PPML models on FHE encrypted data are limited to only simple and non-standard types of machine learning models. These non-standard machine learning models are not proven efficient and accurate with more practical and advanced datasets. Previous PPML schemes replace non-arithmetic activation functions with simple arithmetic functions instead of adopting approximation methods and do not use bootstrapping, which enables continuous homomorphic evaluations. Thus, they could not use standard activation functions and could not employ a large number of layers. The maximum classification accuracy of the existing PPML model with the FHE for the CIFAR-10 dataset was only 77% until now. In this work, we firstly implement the standard ResNet-20 model with the RNS-CKKS FHE with bootstrapping and verify the implemented model with the CIFAR-10 dataset and the plaintext model parameters. Instead of replacing the non-arithmetic functions with the simple arithmetic function, we use state-of-the-art approximation methods to evaluate these non-arithmetic functions, such as the ReLU, with sufficient precision [1]. Further, for the first time, we use the bootstrapping technique of the RNS-CKKS scheme in the proposed model, which enables us to evaluate a deep learning model on the encrypted data. We numerically verify that the proposed model with the CIFAR-10 dataset shows 98.67% identical results to the original ResNet-20 model with non-encrypted data. The classification accuracy of the proposed model is 90.67%, which is pretty close to that of the original ResNet-20 CNN model...

Junghyun Lee, Eunsang Lee, Joon-Woo Lee et al.

Homomorphic encryption is one of the representative solutions to privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) classification enabling the server to classify private data of clients while guaranteeing privacy. This work focuses on PPML using word-wise fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). In order to implement deep learning on word-wise homomorphic encryption (HE), the ReLU and max-pooling functions should be approximated by some polynomials for homomorphic operations. Most of the previous studies focus on HE-friendly networks, where the ReLU and max-pooling functions are approximated using low-degree polynomials. However, for the classification of the CIFAR-10 dataset, using a low-degree polynomial requires designing a new deep learning model and training. In addition, this approximation by low-degree polynomials cannot support deeper neural networks due to large approximation errors. Thus, we propose a precise polynomial approximation technique for the ReLU and max-pooling functions. Precise approximation using a single polynomial requires an exponentially high-degree polynomial, which results in a significant number of non-scalar multiplications. Thus, we propose a method to approximate the ReLU and max-pooling functions accurately using a composition of minimax approximate polynomials of small degrees. If we replace the ReLU and max-pooling functions with the proposed approximate polynomials, well-studied deep learning models such as ResNet and VGGNet can still be used without further modification for PPML on FHE. Even pre-trained parameters can be used without retraining. We approximate the ReLU and max-pooling functions in the ResNet-152 using the composition of minimax approximate polynomials of degrees 15, 27, and 29. Then, we succeed in classifying the plaintext ImageNet dataset with 77.52% accuracy, which is very close to the original model accuracy of 78.31%.

Junghyun Lee, Jawook Gu, Jong Chul Ye

Metal artifact reduction (MAR) is one of the most important research topics in computed tomography (CT). With the advance of deep learning technology for image reconstruction,various deep learning methods have been also suggested for metal artifact removal, among which supervised learning methods are most popular. However, matched non-metal and metal image pairs are difficult to obtain in real CT acquisition. Recently, a promising unsupervised learning for MAR was proposed using feature disentanglement, but the resulting network architecture is complication and difficult to handle large size clinical images. To address this, here we propose a much simpler and much effective unsupervised MAR method for CT. The proposed method is based on a novel beta-cycleGAN architecture derived from the optimal transport theory for appropriate feature space disentanglement. Another important contribution is to show that attention mechanism is the key element to effectively remove the metal artifacts. Specifically, by adding the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) layers with a proper disentanglement parameter, experimental results confirm that we can get more improved MAR that preserves the detailed texture of the original image.