Hao-Yuan Chang

Hao-Yuan Chang, Kang L. Wang

Recent developments in adversarial attacks on deep learning leave many mission-critical natural language processing (NLP) systems at risk of exploitation. To address the lack of computationally efficient adversarial defense methods, this paper reports a novel, universal technique that drastically improves the robustness of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) by combining the unitary weights with the multi-margin loss. We discover that the marriage of these two simple ideas amplifies the protection against malicious interference. Our model, the unitary multi-margin BERT (UniBERT), boosts post-attack classification accuracies significantly by 5.3% to 73.8% while maintaining competitive pre-attack accuracies. Furthermore, the pre-attack and post-attack accuracy tradeoff can be adjusted via a single scalar parameter to best fit the design requirements for the target applications.

Hao-Yuan Chang, Kang L. Wang

Deep neural networks can suffer from the exploding and vanishing activation problem, in which the networks fail to train properly because the neural signals either amplify or attenuate across the layers and become saturated. While other normalization methods aim to fix the stated problem, most of them have inference speed penalties in those applications that require running averages of the neural activations. Here we extend the unitary framework based on Lie algebra to neural networks of any dimensionalities, overcoming the major constraints of the prior arts that limit synaptic weights to be square matrices. Our proposed unitary convolutional neural networks deliver up to 32% faster inference speeds and up to 50% reduction in permanent hard disk space while maintaining competitive prediction accuracy.

Hao-Yuan Chang

Unitary neural networks are promising alternatives for solving the exploding and vanishing activation/gradient problem without the need for explicit normalization that reduces the inference speed. However, they often require longer training time due to the additional unitary constraints on their weight matrices. Here we show a novel algorithm using a backpropagation technique with Lie algebra for computing approximated unitary weights from their pre-trained, non-unitary counterparts. The unitary networks initialized with these approximations can reach the desired accuracies much faster, mitigating their training time penalties while maintaining inference speedups. Our approach will be instrumental in the adaptation of unitary networks, especially for those neural architectures where pre-trained weights are freely available.