Tianlin Li

Yihao Huang, Le Liang, Tianlin Li et al.

In recent years, Text-to-Image (T2I) models have garnered significant attention due to their remarkable advancements. However, security concerns have emerged due to their potential to generate inappropriate or Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) images. In this paper, inspired by the observation that texts with different semantics can lead to similar human perceptions, we propose an LLM-driven perception-guided jailbreak method, termed PGJ. It is a black-box jailbreak method that requires no specific T2I model (model-free) and generates highly natural attack prompts. Specifically, we propose identifying a safe phrase that is similar in human perception yet inconsistent in text semantics with the target unsafe word and using it as a substitution. The experiments conducted on six open-source models and commercial online services with thousands of prompts have verified the effectiveness of PGJ.

Xiaofei Xie, Tianlin Li, Jian Wang et al.

Deep learning has recently been widely applied to many applications across different domains, e.g., image classification and audio recognition. However, the quality of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) still raises concerns in the practical operational environment, which calls for systematic testing, especially in safety-critical scenarios. Inspired by software testing, a number of structural coverage criteria are designed and proposed to measure the test adequacy of DNNs. However, due to the blackbox nature of DNN, the existing structural coverage criteria are difficult to interpret, making it hard to understand the underlying principles of these criteria. The relationship between the structural coverage and the decision logic of DNNs is unknown. Moreover, recent studies have further revealed the non-existence of correlation between the structural coverage and DNN defect detection, which further posts concerns on what a suitable DNN testing criterion should be. In this paper, we propose the interpretable coverage criteria through constructing the decision structure of a DNN. Mirroring the control flow graph of the traditional program, we first extract a decision graph from a DNN based on its interpretation, where a path of the decision graph represents a decision logic of the DNN. Based on the control flow and data flow of the decision graph, we propose two variants of path coverage to measure the adequacy of the test cases in exercising the decision logic. The higher the path coverage, the more diverse decision logic the DNN is expected to be explored. Our large-scale evaluation results demonstrate that: the path in the decision graph is effective in characterizing the decision of the DNN, and the proposed coverage criteria are also sensitive with errors including natural errors and adversarial examples, and strongly correlated with the output impartiality.

Yue Cao, Tianlin Li, Xiaofeng Cao et al.

We introduce a novel approach to counter adversarial attacks, namely, image resampling. Image resampling transforms a discrete image into a new one, simulating the process of scene recapturing or rerendering as specified by a geometrical transformation. The underlying rationale behind our idea is that image resampling can alleviate the influence of adversarial perturbations while preserving essential semantic information, thereby conferring an inherent advantage in defending against adversarial attacks. To validate this concept, we present a comprehensive study on leveraging image resampling to defend against adversarial attacks. We have developed basic resampling methods that employ interpolation strategies and coordinate shifting magnitudes. Our analysis reveals that these basic methods can partially mitigate adversarial attacks. However, they come with apparent limitations: the accuracy of clean images noticeably decreases, while the improvement in accuracy on adversarial examples is not substantial. We propose implicit representation-driven image resampling (IRAD) to overcome these limitations. First, we construct an implicit continuous representation that enables us to represent any input image within a continuous coordinate space. Second, we introduce SampleNet, which automatically generates pixel-wise shifts for resampling in response to different inputs. Furthermore, we can extend our approach to the state-of-the-art diffusion-based method, accelerating it with fewer time steps while preserving its defense capability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the adversarial robustness of diverse deep models against various attacks while maintaining high accuracy on clean images.

Aishan Liu, Yuguang Zhou, Xianglong Liu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed the development of embodied intelligence. By providing a few contextual demonstrations, developers can utilize the extensive internal knowledge of LLMs to effortlessly translate complex tasks described in abstract language into sequences of code snippets, which will serve as the execution logic for embodied agents. However, this paper uncovers a significant backdoor security threat within this process and introduces a novel method called \method{}. By poisoning just a few contextual demonstrations, attackers can covertly compromise the contextual environment of a black-box LLM, prompting it to generate programs with context-dependent defects. These programs appear logically sound but contain defects that can activate and induce unintended behaviors when the operational agent encounters specific triggers in its interactive environment. To compromise the LLM's contextual environment, we employ adversarial in-context generation to optimize poisoned demonstrations, where an LLM judge evaluates these poisoned prompts, reporting to an additional LLM that iteratively optimizes the demonstration in a two-player adversarial game using chain-of-thought reasoning. To enable context-dependent behaviors in downstream agents, we implement a dual-modality activation strategy that controls both the generation and execution of program defects through textual and visual triggers. We expand the scope of our attack by developing five program defect modes that compromise key aspects of confidentiality, integrity, and availability in embodied agents. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted extensive experiments across various tasks, including robot planning, robot manipulation, and compositional visual reasoning. Additionally, we demonstrate the potential impact of our approach by successfully attacking real-world autonomous driving systems.

Tianlin Li, Qing Guo, Aishan Liu et al.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have made significant progress, but often suffer from fairness issues, as deep models typically show distinct accuracy differences among certain subgroups (e.g., males and females). Existing research addresses this critical issue by employing fairness-aware loss functions to constrain the last-layer outputs and directly regularize DNNs. Although the fairness of DNNs is improved, it is unclear how the trained network makes a fair prediction, which limits future fairness improvements. In this paper, we investigate fairness from the perspective of decision rationale and define the parameter parity score to characterize the fair decision process of networks by analyzing neuron influence in various subgroups. Extensive empirical studies show that the unfair issue could arise from the unaligned decision rationales of subgroups. Existing fairness regularization terms fail to achieve decision rationale alignment because they only constrain last-layer outputs while ignoring intermediate neuron alignment. To address the issue, we formulate the fairness as a new task, i.e., decision rationale alignment that requires DNNs' neurons to have consistent responses on subgroups at both intermediate processes and the final prediction. To make this idea practical during optimization, we relax the naive objective function and propose gradient-guided parity alignment, which encourages gradient-weighted consistency of neurons across subgroups. Extensive experiments on a variety of datasets show that our method can significantly enhance fairness while sustaining a high level of accuracy and outperforming other approaches by a wide margin.

Jiachen Zhou, Mingsi Wang, Tianlin Li et al.

Pose-driven human image animation has achieved tremendous progress, enabling the generation of vivid and realistic human videos from just one single photo. However, it conversely exacerbates the risk of image misuse, as attackers may use one available image to create videos involving politics, violence, and other illegal content. To counter this threat, we propose Dormant, a novel protection approach tailored to defend against pose-driven human image animation techniques. Dormant applies protective perturbation to one human image, preserving the visual similarity to the original but resulting in poor-quality video generation. The protective perturbation is optimized to induce misextraction of appearance features from the image and create incoherence among the generated video frames. Our extensive evaluation across 8 animation methods and 4 datasets demonstrates the superiority of Dormant over 6 baseline protection methods, leading to misaligned identities, visual distortions, noticeable artifacts, and inconsistent frames in the generated videos. Moreover, Dormant shows effectiveness on 6 real-world commercial services, even with fully black-box access.

Anran Li, Yuanyuan Chen, Chao Ren et al.

For privacy-preserving graph learning tasks involving distributed graph datasets, federated learning (FL)-based GCN (FedGCN) training is required. A key challenge for FedGCN is scaling to large-scale graphs, which typically incurs high computation and communication costs when dealing with the explosively increasing number of neighbors. Existing graph sampling-enhanced FedGCN training approaches ignore graph structural information or dynamics of optimization, resulting in high variance and inaccurate node embeddings. To address this limitation, we propose the Federated Adaptive Importance-based Sampling (FedAIS) approach. It achieves substantial computational cost saving by focusing the limited resources on training important nodes, while reducing communication overhead via adaptive historical embedding synchronization. The proposed adaptive importance-based sampling method jointly considers the graph structural heterogeneity and the optimization dynamics to achieve optimal trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. Extensive evaluations against five state-of-the-art baselines on five real-world graph datasets show that FedAIS achieves comparable or up to 3.23% higher test accuracy, while saving communication and computation costs by 91.77% and 85.59%.

Yanzhou Li, Tianlin Li, Kangjie Chen et al.

Mainstream backdoor attack methods typically demand substantial tuning data for poisoning, limiting their practicality and potentially degrading the overall performance when applied to Large Language Models (LLMs). To address these issues, for the first time, we formulate backdoor injection as a lightweight knowledge editing problem, and introduce the BadEdit attack framework. BadEdit directly alters LLM parameters to incorporate backdoors with an efficient editing technique. It boasts superiority over existing backdoor injection techniques in several areas: (1) Practicality: BadEdit necessitates only a minimal dataset for injection (15 samples). (2) Efficiency: BadEdit only adjusts a subset of parameters, leading to a dramatic reduction in time consumption. (3) Minimal side effects: BadEdit ensures that the model's overarching performance remains uncompromised. (4) Robustness: the backdoor remains robust even after subsequent fine-tuning or instruction-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that our BadEdit framework can efficiently attack pre-trained LLMs with up to 100\% success rate while maintaining the model's performance on benign inputs.

Kun Wang, Guibin Zhang, Zhenhong Zhou et al. · mit

The remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) has illuminated a promising pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence for both academic and industrial communities, owing to their unprecedented performance across various applications. As LLMs continue to gain prominence in both research and commercial domains, their security and safety implications have become a growing concern, not only for researchers and corporations but also for every nation. Currently, existing surveys on LLM safety primarily focus on specific stages of the LLM lifecycle, e.g., deployment phase or fine-tuning phase, lacking a comprehensive understanding of the entire "lifechain" of LLMs. To address this gap, this paper introduces, for the first time, the concept of "full-stack" safety to systematically consider safety issues throughout the entire process of LLM training, deployment, and eventual commercialization. Compared to the off-the-shelf LLM safety surveys, our work demonstrates several distinctive advantages: (I) Comprehensive Perspective. We define the complete LLM lifecycle as encompassing data preparation, pre-training, post-training, deployment and final commercialization. To our knowledge, this represents the first safety survey to encompass the entire lifecycle of LLMs. (II) Extensive Literature Support. Our research is grounded in an exhaustive review of over 800+ papers, ensuring comprehensive coverage and systematic organization of security issues within a more holistic understanding. (III) Unique Insights. Through systematic literature analysis, we have developed reliable roadmaps and perspectives for each chapter. Our work identifies promising research directions, including safety in data generation, alignment techniques, model editing, and LLM-based agent systems. These insights provide valuable guidance for researchers pursuing future work in this field.

Tianlin Li, Qian Liu, Tianyu Pang et al. · tsinghua

The emerging success of large language models (LLMs) heavily relies on collecting abundant training data from external (untrusted) sources. Despite substantial efforts devoted to data cleaning and curation, well-constructed LLMs have been reported to suffer from copyright infringement, data poisoning, and/or privacy violations, which would impede practical deployment of LLMs. In this study, we propose a simple and easily implementable method for purifying LLMs from the negative effects caused by uncurated data, namely, through ensembling LLMs with benign and small language models (SLMs). Aside from theoretical guarantees, we perform comprehensive experiments to empirically confirm the efficacy of ensembling LLMs with SLMs, which can effectively preserve the performance of LLMs while mitigating issues such as copyright infringement, data poisoning, and privacy violations.

Xinyue Li, Zhenpeng Chen, Jie M. Zhang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become foundational in modern language-driven applications, profoundly influencing daily life. A critical technique in leveraging their potential is role-playing, where LLMs simulate diverse roles to enhance their real-world utility. However, while research has highlighted the presence of social biases in LLM outputs, it remains unclear whether and to what extent these biases emerge during role-playing scenarios. In this paper, we introduce BiasLens, a fairness testing framework designed to systematically expose biases in LLMs during role-playing. Our approach uses LLMs to generate 550 social roles across a comprehensive set of 11 demographic attributes, producing 33,000 role-specific questions targeting various forms of bias. These questions, spanning Yes/No, multiple-choice, and open-ended formats, are designed to prompt LLMs to adopt specific roles and respond accordingly. We employ a combination of rule-based and LLM-based strategies to identify biased responses, rigorously validated through human evaluation. Using the generated questions as the benchmark, we conduct extensive evaluations of six advanced LLMs released by OpenAI, Mistral AI, Meta, Alibaba, and DeepSeek. Our benchmark reveals 72,716 biased responses across the studied LLMs, with individual models yielding between 7,754 and 16,963 biased responses, underscoring the prevalence of bias in role-playing contexts. To support future research, we have publicly released the benchmark, along with all scripts and experimental results.

Tianlin Li, Xiaoyu Zhang, Chao Du et al. · tsinghua

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) underscores the urgent need to ensure their fairness. However, LLMs frequently present dominant viewpoints while ignoring alternative perspectives from minority parties, resulting in potential biases. We hypothesize that these fairness-violating behaviors occur because LLMs express their viewpoints using a human personality that represents the majority of training data. In response to this, we validate that prompting LLMs with specific roles can allow LLMs to express diverse viewpoints. Building on this insight and observation, we develop FairThinking, a pipeline designed to automatically generate roles that enable LLMs to articulate diverse perspectives for fair expressions. To evaluate FairThinking, we create a dataset with a thousand items covering three fairness-related topics and conduct experiments on GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Llama2, and Mistral to demonstrate its superior performance.

Kaixin Wang, Tianlin Li, Xiaoyu Zhang et al.

Code large language models (CodeLLMs) and agents have shown great promise in tackling complex software engineering tasks.Compared to traditional software engineering methods, CodeLLMs and agents offer stronger abilities, and can flexibly process inputs and outputs in both natural and code. Benchmarking plays a crucial role in evaluating the capabilities of CodeLLMs and agents, guiding their development and deployment. However, despite their growing significance, there remains a lack of comprehensive reviews of benchmarks for CodeLLMs and agents. To bridge this gap, this paper provides a comprehensive review of existing benchmarks for CodeLLMs and agents, studying and analyzing 181 benchmarks from 461 relevant papers, covering the different phases of the software development life cycle (SDLC). Our findings reveal a notable imbalance in the coverage of current benchmarks, with approximately 60% focused on the software development phase in SDLC, while requirements engineering and software design phases receive minimal attention at only 5% and 3%, respectively. Additionally, Python emerges as the dominant programming language across the reviewed benchmarks. Finally, this paper highlights the challenges of current research and proposes future directions, aiming to narrow the gap between the theoretical capabilities of CodeLLMs and agents and their application in real-world scenarios.

Zeke Xia, Ming Hu, Dengke Yan et al.

Federated Learning (FL) as a promising distributed machine learning paradigm has been widely adopted in Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) applications. However, the efficiency and inference capability of FL is seriously limited due to the presence of stragglers and data imbalance across massive AIoT devices, respectively. To address the above challenges, we present a novel asynchronous FL approach named CaBaFL, which includes a hierarchical Cache-based aggregation mechanism and a feature Balance-guided device selection strategy. CaBaFL maintains multiple intermediate models simultaneously for local training. The hierarchical cache-based aggregation mechanism enables each intermediate model to be trained on multiple devices to align the training time and mitigate the straggler issue. In specific, each intermediate model is stored in a low-level cache for local training and when it is trained by sufficient local devices, it will be stored in a high-level cache for aggregation. To address the problem of imbalanced data, the feature balance-guided device selection strategy in CaBaFL adopts the activation distribution as a metric, which enables each intermediate model to be trained across devices with totally balanced data distributions before aggregation. Experimental results show that compared with the state-of-the-art FL methods, CaBaFL achieves up to 9.26X training acceleration and 19.71\% accuracy improvements.

Qi Zhou, Tianlin Li, Qing Guo et al.

Recent studies have raised significant concerns regarding the vulnerability of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) to maliciously injected or perturbed input images, which can mislead their responses. Existing defense methods show that such vision attacks are sensitive to image modifications especially cropping, using majority voting across responses of modified images as corrected responses. However, these modifications often result in partial images and distort the semantics, which reduces response quality on clean images after voting. Instead of directly using responses from partial images for voting, we investigate using them to supervise the LVLM's responses to the original images. We propose a black-box, training-free method called DPS (Defense through Partial-Perception Supervision). In this approach, the model is prompted using the responses generated by a model that perceives only a partial image. With DPS, the model can adjust its response based on partial image understanding when under attack, while confidently maintaining its original response for clean input. Our findings show that the weak model can supervise the strong model: when faced with an attacked input, the strong model becomes less confident and adjusts its response based on the weak model's partial understanding, effectively defending against the attack. With clean input, it confidently maintains its original response. Empirical experiments show our method outperforms the baseline, cutting the average attack success rate by 76.3% across six datasets on three popular models.

Longtian Wang, Xiaofei Xie, Tianlin Li et al.

Text-to-image (T2I) models have significantly advanced in producing high-quality images. However, such models have the ability to generate images containing not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content, such as pornography, violence, political content, and discrimination. To mitigate the risk of generating NSFW content, refusal mechanisms, i.e., safety checkers, have been developed to check potential NSFW content. Adversarial prompting techniques have been developed to evaluate the robustness of the refusal mechanisms. The key challenge remains to subtly modify the prompt in a way that preserves its sensitive nature while bypassing the refusal mechanisms. In this paper, we introduce TokenProber, a method designed for sensitivity-aware differential testing, aimed at evaluating the robustness of the refusal mechanisms in T2I models by generating adversarial prompts. Our approach is based on the key observation that adversarial prompts often succeed by exploiting discrepancies in how T2I models and safety checkers interpret sensitive content. Thus, we conduct a fine-grained analysis of the impact of specific words within prompts, distinguishing between dirty words that are essential for NSFW content generation and discrepant words that highlight the different sensitivity assessments between T2I models and safety checkers. Through the sensitivity-aware mutation, TokenProber generates adversarial prompts, striking a balance between maintaining NSFW content generation and evading detection. Our evaluation of TokenProber against 5 safety checkers on 3 popular T2I models, using 324 NSFW prompts, demonstrates its superior effectiveness in bypassing safety filters compared to existing methods (e.g., 54%+ increase on average), highlighting TokenProber's ability to uncover robustness issues in the existing refusal mechanisms.

Wei Ma, Yixiao Yang, Qiang Hu et al.

Applications of Large Language Models~(LLMs) have evolved from simple text generators into complex software systems that integrate retrieval augmentation, tool invocation, and multi-turn interactions. Their inherent non-determinism, dynamism, and context dependence pose fundamental challenges for quality assurance. This paper decomposes LLM applications into a three-layer architecture: \textbf{\textit{System Shell Layer}}, \textbf{\textit{Prompt Orchestration Layer}}, and \textbf{\textit{LLM Inference Core}}. We then assess the applicability of traditional software testing methods in each layer: directly applicable at the shell layer, requiring semantic reinterpretation at the orchestration layer, and necessitating paradigm shifts at the inference core. A comparative analysis of Testing AI methods from the software engineering community and safety analysis techniques from the AI community reveals structural disconnects in testing unit abstraction, evaluation metrics, and lifecycle management. We identify four fundamental differences that underlie 6 core challenges. To address these, we propose four types of collaborative strategies (\emph{Retain}, \emph{Translate}, \emph{Integrate}, and \emph{Runtime}) and explore a closed-loop, trustworthy quality assurance framework that combines pre-deployment validation with runtime monitoring. Based on these strategies, we offer practical guidance and a protocol proposal to support the standardization and tooling of LLM application testing. We propose a protocol \textbf{\textit{Agent Interaction Communication Language}} (AICL) that is used to communicate between AI agents. AICL has the test-oriented features and is easily integrated in the current agent framework.

Yanzhou Li, Tianlin Li, Yiran Zhang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for function completion in repository-scale codebases. Prior studies demonstrate that when explicit instructions--such as docstrings--are provided, these models can generate highly accurate implementations. However, in real-world repositories, such annotations are frequently absent, and performance drops substantially without them. To address this gap, we frame the task as a three-stage process. The first stage focuses on intent inference, where the model analyzes the code preceding the target function to uncover cues about the desired functionality. Such preceding context often encodes subtle but critical information, and we design a reasoning-based prompting framework to guide the LLM through step-by-step extraction and synthesis of these signals before any code is generated. The second stage introduces an optional interactive refinement mechanism to handle cases where preceding context alone is insufficient for intent recovery. In this stage, the model proposes a small set of candidate intentions, enabling the developer to select or edit them so that the inferred intent closely matches the actual requirement. Finally, in the third stage, the LLM generates the target function conditioned on the finalized intent. To support this pipeline, we curate a dataset of 40,000 examples annotated with intermediate reasoning traces and corresponding docstrings. Extensive experiments on DevEval and ComplexCodeEval show that our approach consistently boosts multiple LLMs, achieving over 20\% relative gains in both reference-based and execution-based metrics, with the interactive refinement stage delivering additional improvements beyond these gains.

Yihao Huang, Yue Cao, Tianlin Li et al.

Segment anything model (SAM) has presented impressive objectness identification capability with the idea of prompt learning and a new collected large-scale dataset. Given a prompt (e.g., points, bounding boxes, or masks) and an input image, SAM is able to generate valid segment masks for all objects indicated by the prompts, presenting high generalization across diverse scenarios and being a general method for zero-shot transfer to downstream vision tasks. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether SAM may introduce errors in certain threatening scenarios. Clarifying this is of significant importance for applications that require robustness, such as autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we aim to study the testing-time robustness of SAM under adversarial scenarios and common corruptions. To this end, we first build a testing-time robustness evaluation benchmark for SAM by integrating existing public datasets. Second, we extend representative adversarial attacks against SAM and study the influence of different prompts on robustness. Third, we study the robustness of SAM under diverse corruption types by evaluating SAM on corrupted datasets with different prompts. With experiments conducted on SA-1B and KITTI datasets, we find that SAM exhibits remarkable robustness against various corruptions, except for blur-related corruption. Furthermore, SAM remains susceptible to adversarial attacks, particularly when subjected to PGD and BIM attacks. We think such a comprehensive study could highlight the importance of the robustness issues of SAM and trigger a series of new tasks for SAM as well as downstream vision tasks.

Yisong Xiao, Aishan Liu, Tianlin Li et al.

Machine learning (ML) systems have achieved remarkable performance across a wide area of applications. However, they frequently exhibit unfair behaviors in sensitive application domains, raising severe fairness concerns. To evaluate and test fairness, engineers often generate individual discriminatory instances to expose unfair behaviors before model deployment. However, existing baselines ignore the naturalness of generation and produce instances that deviate from the real data distribution, which may fail to reveal the actual model fairness since these unnatural discriminatory instances are unlikely to appear in practice. To address the problem, this paper proposes a framework named Latent Imitator (LIMI) to generate more natural individual discriminatory instances with the help of a generative adversarial network (GAN), where we imitate the decision boundary of the target model in the semantic latent space of GAN and further samples latent instances on it. Specifically, we first derive a surrogate linear boundary to coarsely approximate the decision boundary of the target model, which reflects the nature of the original data distribution. Subsequently, to obtain more natural instances, we manipulate random latent vectors to the surrogate boundary with a one-step movement, and further conduct vector calculation to probe two potential discriminatory candidates that may be more closely located in the real decision boundary. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate that our LIMI outperforms other baselines largely in effectiveness ($\times$9.42 instances), efficiency ($\times$8.71 speeds), and naturalness (+19.65%) on average. In addition, we empirically demonstrate that retraining on test samples generated by our approach can lead to improvements in both individual fairness (45.67% on $IF_r$ and 32.81% on $IF_o$) and group fairness (9.86% on $SPD$ and 28.38% on $AOD$}).

Zhiming Li, Yanzhou Li, Tianlin Li et al.

Deep learning has introduced significant improvements in many software analysis tasks. Although the Large Language Models (LLMs) based neural code models demonstrate commendable performance when trained and tested within the intra-project independent and identically distributed (IID) setting, they often struggle to generalize effectively to real-world inter-project out-of-distribution (OOD) data. In this work, we show that this phenomenon is caused by the heavy reliance on project-specific shortcuts for prediction instead of ground-truth evidence. We propose a Cond-Idf measurement to interpret this behavior, which quantifies the relatedness of a token with a label and its project-specificness. The strong correlation between model behavior and the proposed measurement indicates that without proper regularization, models tend to leverage spurious statistical cues for prediction. Equipped with these observations, we propose a novel bias mitigation mechanism that regularizes the model's learning behavior by leveraging latent logic relations among samples. Experimental results on two representative program analysis tasks indicate that our mitigation framework can improve both inter-project OOD generalization and adversarial robustness, while not sacrificing accuracy on intra-project IID data.

Chongzhi Zhang, Aishan Liu, Xianglong Liu et al.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial examples where inputs with imperceptible perturbations mislead DNNs to incorrect results. Despite the potential risk they bring, adversarial examples are also valuable for providing insights into the weakness and blind-spots of DNNs. Thus, the interpretability of a DNN in the adversarial setting aims to explain the rationale behind its decision-making process and makes deeper understanding which results in better practical applications. To address this issue, we try to explain adversarial robustness for deep models from a new perspective of neuron sensitivity which is measured by neuron behavior variation intensity against benign and adversarial examples. In this paper, we first draw the close connection between adversarial robustness and neuron sensitivities, as sensitive neurons make the most non-trivial contributions to model predictions in the adversarial setting. Based on that, we further propose to improve adversarial robustness by constraining the similarities of sensitive neurons between benign and adversarial examples which stabilizes the behaviors of sensitive neurons towards adversarial noises. Moreover, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art adversarial training methods improve model robustness by reducing neuron sensitivities which in turn confirms the strong connections between adversarial robustness and neuron sensitivity as well as the effectiveness of using sensitive neurons to build robust models. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate that our algorithm effectively achieves excellent results.

Ruofan Liang, Tianlin Li, Longfei Li et al.

This paper aims to analyze knowledge consistency between pre-trained deep neural networks. We propose a generic definition for knowledge consistency between neural networks at different fuzziness levels. A task-agnostic method is designed to disentangle feature components, which represent the consistent knowledge, from raw intermediate-layer features of each neural network. As a generic tool, our method can be broadly used for different applications. In preliminary experiments, we have used knowledge consistency as a tool to diagnose representations of neural networks. Knowledge consistency provides new insights to explain the success of existing deep-learning techniques, such as knowledge distillation and network compression. More crucially, knowledge consistency can also be used to refine pre-trained networks and boost performance.