Wenjie Qu

Jinyuan Jia, Wenjie Qu, Neil Zhenqiang Gong

Multi-label classification, which predicts a set of labels for an input, has many applications. However, multiple recent studies showed that multi-label classification is vulnerable to adversarial examples. In particular, an attacker can manipulate the labels predicted by a multi-label classifier for an input via adding carefully crafted, human-imperceptible perturbation to it. Existing provable defenses for multi-class classification achieve sub-optimal provable robustness guarantees when generalized to multi-label classification. In this work, we propose MultiGuard, the first provably robust defense against adversarial examples to multi-label classification. Our MultiGuard leverages randomized smoothing, which is the state-of-the-art technique to build provably robust classifiers. Specifically, given an arbitrary multi-label classifier, our MultiGuard builds a smoothed multi-label classifier via adding random noise to the input. We consider isotropic Gaussian noise in this work. Our major theoretical contribution is that we show a certain number of ground truth labels of an input are provably in the set of labels predicted by our MultiGuard when the $\ell_2$-norm of the adversarial perturbation added to the input is bounded. Moreover, we design an algorithm to compute our provable robustness guarantees. Empirically, we evaluate our MultiGuard on VOC 2007, MS-COCO, and NUS-WIDE benchmark datasets. Our code is available at: \url{https://github.com/quwenjie/MultiGuard}

Wenjie Qu, Jinyuan Jia, Neil Zhenqiang Gong

Encoder as a service is an emerging cloud service. Specifically, a service provider first pre-trains an encoder (i.e., a general-purpose feature extractor) via either supervised learning or self-supervised learning and then deploys it as a cloud service API. A client queries the cloud service API to obtain feature vectors for its training/testing inputs when training/testing its classifier (called downstream classifier). A downstream classifier is vulnerable to adversarial examples, which are testing inputs with carefully crafted perturbation that the downstream classifier misclassifies. Therefore, in safety and security critical applications, a client aims to build a robust downstream classifier and certify its robustness guarantees against adversarial examples. What APIs should the cloud service provide, such that a client can use any certification method to certify the robustness of its downstream classifier against adversarial examples while minimizing the number of queries to the APIs? How can a service provider pre-train an encoder such that clients can build more certifiably robust downstream classifiers? We aim to answer the two questions in this work. For the first question, we show that the cloud service only needs to provide two APIs, which we carefully design, to enable a client to certify the robustness of its downstream classifier with a minimal number of queries to the APIs. For the second question, we show that an encoder pre-trained using a spectral-norm regularization term enables clients to build more robust downstream classifiers.

Hongbin Liu, Wenjie Qu, Jinyuan Jia et al.

Classifiers in supervised learning have various security and privacy issues, e.g., 1) data poisoning attacks, backdoor attacks, and adversarial examples on the security side as well as 2) inference attacks and the right to be forgotten for the training data on the privacy side. Various secure and privacy-preserving supervised learning algorithms with formal guarantees have been proposed to address these issues. However, they suffer from various limitations such as accuracy loss, small certified security guarantees, and/or inefficiency. Self-supervised learning is an emerging technique to pre-train encoders using unlabeled data. Given a pre-trained encoder as a feature extractor, supervised learning can train a simple yet accurate classifier using a small amount of labeled training data. In this work, we perform the first systematic, principled measurement study to understand whether and when a pre-trained encoder can address the limitations of secure or privacy-preserving supervised learning algorithms. Our key findings are that a pre-trained encoder substantially improves 1) both accuracy under no attacks and certified security guarantees against data poisoning and backdoor attacks of state-of-the-art secure learning algorithms (i.e., bagging and KNN), 2) certified security guarantees of randomized smoothing against adversarial examples without sacrificing its accuracy under no attacks, 3) accuracy of differentially private classifiers, and 4) accuracy and/or efficiency of exact machine unlearning.

Wenjie Qu, Youqi Li, Binghui Wang

Image segmentation is an important problem in many safety-critical applications. Recent studies show that modern image segmentation models are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, while existing attack methods mainly follow the idea of attacking image classification models. We argue that image segmentation and classification have inherent differences, and design an attack framework specially for image segmentation models. Our attack framework is inspired by certified radius, which was originally used by defenders to defend against adversarial perturbations to classification models. We are the first, from the attacker perspective, to leverage the properties of certified radius and propose a certified radius guided attack framework against image segmentation models. Specifically, we first adapt randomized smoothing, the state-of-the-art certification method for classification models, to derive the pixel's certified radius. We then focus more on disrupting pixels with relatively smaller certified radii and design a pixel-wise certified radius guided loss, when plugged into any existing white-box attack, yields our certified radius-guided white-box attack. Next, we propose the first black-box attack to image segmentation models via bandit. We design a novel gradient estimator, based on bandit feedback, which is query-efficient and provably unbiased and stable. We use this gradient estimator to design a projected bandit gradient descent (PBGD) attack, as well as a certified radius-guided PBGD (CR-PBGD) attack. We prove our PBGD and CR-PBGD attacks can achieve asymptotically optimal attack performance with an optimal rate. We evaluate our certified-radius guided white-box and black-box attacks on multiple modern image segmentation models and datasets. Our results validate the effectiveness of our certified radius-guided attack framework.

Yongji Wu, Wenjie Qu, Xueshen Liu et al.

Sparsely-activated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture has increasingly been adopted to further scale large language models (LLMs). However, frequent failures still pose significant challenges as training scales. The cost of even a single failure is significant, as all GPUs need to idle wait until the failure is resolved, potentially losing considerable training progress as training has to restart from checkpoints. This problem is exacerbated by the growing use of spot instances on public clouds for model training, which despite offering substantial cost savings, introduce frequent preemptions-essentially failures that regularly occur throughout the training process. Existing solutions for efficient fault-tolerant training either lack elasticity or rely on building resiliency into pipeline parallelism, which cannot be applied to MoE models due to the expert parallelism strategy adopted by the MoE architecture. We present Lazarus, a system for resilient and elastic training of MoE models. Lazarus adaptively allocates expert replicas to address the inherent imbalance in expert workload and speeds up training, while a provably optimal expert placement algorithm is developed to maximize the probability of recovery upon failures. Through adaptive expert placement and a flexible token dispatcher, Lazarus can also fully utilize all available nodes after failures, leaving no GPU idle. Our evaluation shows that Lazarus outperforms existing MoE training systems by up to 5.7x under frequent node failures and 3.4x on a real spot instance trace.

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.

Linyu Wu, Linhao Zhong, Wenjie Qu et al.

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer faster generation than autoregressive models while maintaining comparable quality, but existing watermarking methods fail on them due to their non-sequential decoding. Unlike autoregressive models that generate tokens left-to-right, dLLMs can finalize tokens in arbitrary order, breaking the causal design underlying traditional watermarks. We present DMark, the first watermarking framework designed specifically for dLLMs. DMark introduces three complementary strategies to restore watermark detectability: predictive watermarking uses model-predicted tokens when actual context is unavailable; bidirectional watermarking exploits both forward and backward dependencies unique to diffusion decoding; and predictive-bidirectional watermarking combines both approaches to maximize detection strength. Experiments across multiple dLLMs show that DMark achieves 92.0-99.5% detection rates at 1% false positive rate while maintaining text quality, compared to only 49.6-71.2% for naive adaptations of existing methods. DMark also demonstrates robustness against text manipulations, establishing that effective watermarking is feasible for non-autoregressive language models.

Hongbin Liu, Jinyuan Jia, Wenjie Qu et al.

Given a set of unlabeled images or (image, text) pairs, contrastive learning aims to pre-train an image encoder that can be used as a feature extractor for many downstream tasks. In this work, we propose EncoderMI, the first membership inference method against image encoders pre-trained by contrastive learning. In particular, given an input and a black-box access to an image encoder, EncoderMI aims to infer whether the input is in the training dataset of the image encoder. EncoderMI can be used 1) by a data owner to audit whether its (public) data was used to pre-train an image encoder without its authorization or 2) by an attacker to compromise privacy of the training data when it is private/sensitive. Our EncoderMI exploits the overfitting of the image encoder towards its training data. In particular, an overfitted image encoder is more likely to output more (or less) similar feature vectors for two augmented versions of an input in (or not in) its training dataset. We evaluate EncoderMI on image encoders pre-trained on multiple datasets by ourselves as well as the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) image encoder, which is pre-trained on 400 million (image, text) pairs collected from the Internet and released by OpenAI. Our results show that EncoderMI can achieve high accuracy, precision, and recall. We also explore a countermeasure against EncoderMI via preventing overfitting through early stopping. Our results show that it achieves trade-offs between accuracy of EncoderMI and utility of the image encoder, i.e., it can reduce the accuracy of EncoderMI, but it also incurs classification accuracy loss of the downstream classifiers built based on the image encoder.